SUSHI joins the ARB bandwagon, but whales swim away

• SushiSwap collected large amounts of ARB due to Arbitrum’s AirDrop.
• SUSHI faced the heat as whales seemingly lost interest in the token.

If a 22 March tweet by SushiSwap [SUSHI] is to be believed, the protocol would be on the receiving end of a large amount of Arbitrum [ARB]. Notably, the latter would be AirDropping 4.2 million ARB onto the Sushi network.

📣We are proud to announce that 🍣Sushi will be receiving an airdrop of 4,249,418 $ARB tokens from @Arbitrum!

With ambitious plans for 2023, we aim to further solidify our position as a leader in DeFi and a key player in the Arbitrum network💪 https://t.co/ehUfmtymLO

— SushiSwap (@SushiSwap) March 21, 2023

Is your portfolio green? Check out the SUSHI Profit Calculator

These funds can be added to SushiSwap’s treasury, which was worth $20.3 million at press time, according to data from Token Terminal. This can be used to make progress on the protocol and improve the DEX.

In other news, the protocol’s network activity fell over the last week. This was indicated by the declining number of code commits, which dropped by 72.3% over the last week on SushiSwap’s GitHub. The added influx of revenue that will be procured through the Arbitrum AirDrop will aid the protocol in financially incentivizing more developments.

Source: token terminal

However, despite the declining code commits on its GitHub, SushiSwap was performing better than most protocols in terms of volume. It captured 14.2% of all DEX market share, coming in second only to Uniswap [UNI] at press time, according to Dune Analytics.

Source: Dune Analytics

Whales lose their appetite for Sushi

Even though the protocol saw a lot of success, whales started to exit their positions in SUSHI. According to lookonchain, asset management giant GoldenTree unstaked around $2.68 million worth of SUSHI on 23 March. Other whales had unstaked $4.38 million worth of the token at press time.

1/ Goldentree unstaked all 5,954,024 $SUSHI and transferred 2.5M $SUSHI ($ 2.68M) to #Binance via Cumberland 2 hrs ago.

And currently holds 3.44M $SUSHI($3.67M). pic.twitter.com/Z0PJ5lZRmJ

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) March 23, 2023

Realistic or not, here’s SUSHI’s market cap in BTC’s terms

If these addresses decide to sell their unstaked SUSHI, they would do so at a loss. A sell-off at this scale would also end up driving SUSHI’s price down further.

Along with SUSHI’s prices, its network growth also fell over the last few days. This suggested that the new addresses were not as interested in the token at the time of writing.

Source: Santiment