Unclaimed ARB Tokens Worth $56M Returned To DAO

Sometimes there’s a free lunch and people just don’t take advantage of it — on Sept. 25, the Arbitrum Foundation moved $56.5M worth of unclaimed ARB tokens left over from the Layer 2 network’s token airdrop in March.

ARB is the governance token of Arbitrum, the leading Ethereum scaling solution with $5.6B in total value locked (TVL).

Early adopters of the network who were eligible for the airdrop could have claimed their tokens for nearly no cost. Now, the unclaimed tokens will go back to the Arbitrum DAO, said the Arbitrum Foundation, which was established alongside the airdrop and is the organization that stewards the Arbitrum ecosysem.

The $56.5M of unclaimed tokens is remarkable — airdrop hunting is so popular that a niche industry has emerged around establishing eligibility for what have often been five-figure windfalls. It’s likely many people simply aren’t aware they can claim ARB tokens. Others may have lost track of their wallets’ private keys.

To be sure, eligible addresses were still claiming their ARB allocations until the deadline, according to Arbiscan. Given that the maximum claim for an individual address was 10,250 tokens, however, tens of millions of ARB remained unclaimed.

Some on social media are theorizing that Arbitrum may distribute its reacquired ARB tokens to participants in a growth initiative called Odyssey, which the foundation reinstated last week. The program was so popular that network congestion pushed the Arbitrum team to pause it when the Odyssey first launched in summer 2022.

The Arbitrum DAO has already voted to support a new incentive program geared towards growing the Layer 2’s ecosystem. The ARB airdrop remains the largest in crypto history with tokens worth $1.7B distributed at the time.