Arbitrum Foundation Homepage Crashes as Users Rush to Claim ARB Tokens

Just as Arbitrum opened the gates to its ARB token, the project’s landing page briefly crashed.

The homepage reported a 429 error, indicating that it is being overwhelmed by user traffic. The site was also the primary mechanism by which eligible users could claim their airdropped ARB tokens.

Alongside the homepage, Arbiscan also crashed, with a note that reads: “The service is unavailable.”

Like Etherscan, Arbiscan is a convenient data platform that collects various Arbitrum metrics including gas fees and transaction numbers.

ARB is the speedy layer-2’s highly-anticipated governance token which was first announced on March 16. Since then, Crypto Twitter has been actively attempting to calculate how much one token will cost.

The majority of eligible wallet addresses are expected to receive 625 tokens. Certain wallets that fulfilled the entire eligibility criteria are expected to see 10,250 tokens.

Despite the launch woes, according to Nansen data, around 14.5% of the total ARB claims were processed during this period. 

Users likely managed to claim the token through Arbiscan once it came back online. The website provides an alternative way to claim the airdrop by using the claim function from the contract. 

Nevertheless, the claiming process resulted in unexpected errors. The “Write” option returned errors such as RPC limit “exceeded.”

At other times, the estimated gas fees for a transaction were over $5.8 billion.

The early claimants most likely sold their holdings on the market as the price of ARB fell from a high of $8.67 to $1.4 in the first 30 minutes after the claims began, per CoinGecko.