Arbitrum Airdrop Finally Announced – Crypto Briefing

After months of feverish anticipation, Arbitrum is finally ready to airdrop a native token—ARB. Here’s what you need to know.

Airdrop Claimable by March 23

The Arbitrum community is rejoicing.

Ethereum Layer 2 solution Arbitrum finally announced today that it would be airdropping its long-awaited governance token, ARB, to early users of the network.

“After years of development and nearly 18 months running on mainnet, The Arbitrum Foundation is extremely excited to announce the launch of DAO governance for the Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks, a massive leap forward in the decentralization of the two networks,” stated the project.

Eligibility for the airdrop was determined by a number of factors: bridging to Arbitrum One or Arbitrum Nova, transacting on the network over the span of several months, interacting with multiple smart contracts, conducting transactions over of $10,000 in value, and providing over $10,000 in liquidity to various protocols. The completion of any one of these steps guarantees users a portion of the ARB airdrop, with the size of the allocation increasing based on the number of fulfilled criteria.

Although users can already check on the official website whether they qualified, the airdrop will only be claimable on March 23. Arbitrum indicated that 11.62% of the total token supply would be used for the airdrop: the Arbitrum DAO treasury will receive 42.78% of the supply, the team and its advisors 26.94%, investors 17.53%, and DAOs in the Arbitrum ecosystem 1.13%. 

Arbitrum is one of many crypto projects—such as Optimism, Polygon, zkSync, and StarkNet—aiming to make transactions on the Ethereum network more affordable by outsourcing computational data and subsequently sending validity proofs back to the mainnet. The scheme saves block space and allows for transactions to be bundled together, further reducing the amount of data committed to mainnet while splitting gas fees between many users.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other crypto assets.