Arbitrum announces launch of ARB token, but here’s the caveat

• The ARB token will be air­dropped to eli­gi­ble com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers on 23 March.
• The num­ber of total layer‑2 trans­ac­tions jumped to a record high.

Arbi­trum, the pop­u­lar layer‑2 solu­tion, reg­is­tered a sharp increase in trad­ing activ­i­ty on its net­work. As per Dune Ana­lyt­ics, the num­ber of dai­ly trans­ac­tions went past 1.4 mil­lion on 16 March.

The num­ber of dai­ly active users also went past 135,000, rep­re­sent­ing a jump of more than 50% over the past week.

Source: Dune Analytics

Such an upswing was last wit­nessed dur­ing the lat­ter part of Feb­ru­ary, dur­ing which Arbi­trum man­aged to sur­pass Ethereum in dai­ly trans­ac­tions. How­ev­er, since then trad­ing activ­i­ty slowed down considerably.

So, what’s changed on 16 March?

Say hello to ARB!

The Arbi­trum ecosys­tem announced the launch of its native token, ARB, spec­u­la­tions of which were rife in the cryp­to space since the unprece­dent­ed increase in trad­ing activ­i­ty on the blockchain.

Arbi­trum joined oth­er layer‑2 solu­tions like Opti­mism [OP] in launch­ing its gov­er­nance token. Arbi­trum said that the upcom­ing air­drop, slat­ed for 23 March, will dis­trib­ute 12.75% of the tokens meant for com­mu­ni­ty allo­ca­tion. While 56% of the tokens will be com­mu­ni­ty-owned, 44% will be set aside for investors and core contributors.

Today The Arbi­trum Foun­da­tion is extreme­ly excit­ed to announce the launch of DAO gov­er­nance for the Arbi­trum One and Arbi­trum Nova net­works, along­side the launch of $ARB. https://t.co/TB3wG0QK0v

— Arbi­trum (💙,🧡) (@arbitrum) March 16, 2023

Addi­tion­al data from Dune Ana­lyt­ics showed that about 625,143 address­es were eli­gi­ble for the air­drop. While 11.62% will be received as part of user air­drop, 1.1% will go to DAOs that oper­ate in the Arbi­trum ecosystem.

The launch of the gov­er­nance token will enable hold­ers to vote and pro­pose changes regard­ing Arbi­trum One and Arbi­trum Nova net­works, mark­ing Arbitrum’s tran­si­tion to a full-fledged decen­tral­ized autonomous orga­ni­za­tion (DAO).

Arbi­trum even pub­lished the list of recip­i­ents and the eli­gi­bil­i­ty cri­te­ria for the upcom­ing airdrop.

Layer‑2 landscape gets a major boost

On expect­ed lines, there was a surge in the num­ber of trans­ac­tions on the net­work, which in turn pushed the num­ber of total layer‑2 trans­ac­tions to a record high, as per a tweet by Col­in Wu.

The num­ber of L2 trans­ac­tions reached 1.546 mil­lion on March 16, a record high in a sin­gle day, which is about 148% of the Ethereum L1. The num­ber of Arbi­trum trans­ac­tions exceed­ed 1 mil­lion, which may be the with­draw­al of funds after the https://t.co/OyPP4zyd1b… https://t.co/anPooJZhlu

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) March 17, 2023

On top of this, there was a con­sid­er­able jump in Arbitrum’s total val­ue locked (TVL). On a year-to-date basis, the TVL rose by 86%, indica­tive of the con­fi­dence the investors reposed in the network.

The decen­tral­ized deriv­a­tive exchange GMX had a dom­i­nance of more than 38% in Arbitrum’s TVL.

Source: DeFiLla­ma