Arbitrum whales buy more governance tokens as grant distributions begin

After Arbitrum started distributing governance tokens to eligible decentralized autonomous organizations, some large token holders — commonly called whales — have been adding to their stacks.

Earlier today, one address holding 1.95 million Arbitrum governance tokens — worth roughly $2.7 million — received nearly $200,000 in ARB from Binance. At the time, the price of one token was $1.38, according to on-chain analysis Twitter account Lookonchain.

Not long before, a second address holding 1.78 million governance tokens — worth $2.5 million — spent 80 ETH on buying roughly $146,000 worth of ARB at $1.34 per token.

The latter address has made more than $7.3 million on successful trades, Lookonchain also noted.

The price of Arbitrum’s governance token has increased by more than 4% today. Source: TradingView

Arbitrum distributing governance tokens to DAOs

Arbitrum, the leading Layer 2 network on Ethereum, began distributing governance tokens to DAOs earlier this week.

Its core team previously designated 1.13% of the overall 10 billion governance token supply — equivalent to 113 million ARB with a current value exceeding $145 million — to be distributed among qualifying projects in the Arbitrum ecosystem.

The distribution of governance tokens to DAOs is intended to help bootstrap activity on the Arbitrum network. The tokens may be allocated to projects’ treasuries or used for other objectives, as determined by the respective DAOs.

Projects receiving governance tokens include Uniswap, Sushi, Aave, GMX, Hop Protocol, Radiant Capital, Balancer, Synapse, MakerDAO, Curve, Layer Zero and 1inch.

An imperfect start

Arbitrum’s governance got off to a rocky start after the project’s foundation preemptively spent 50 million tokens without waiting for Arbitrum Improvement Proposal 1 to pass. After the news broke, AIP-1 was rejected.

However, a follow-up proposal, AIP 1.1, passed as the community broadly consented to the foundation’s receiving the 750 million ARB tokens, as planned.

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