Arbitrum's Highly-Anticipated $ARB Token Airdrop: What to Expect?

Community Power with $ARB

Arbitrum announced to launch of its much-awaited DAO governance and its native $ARB token on March 23.

According to the Arbitrum Foundation, the launch of $ARB marks the evolution of Arbitrum into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Thus, $ARB holders will be able to decide on key decisions governing Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova - networks that provide faster and cheaper transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.

“Today’s launch isn’t only a milestone for Arbitrum; it’s a historic day for Ethereum scaling more broadly,” Arbitrum Foundation said in a statement. “With today’s announcement, Arbitrum has become the first EVM rollup ever to achieve the second of the three stages.” 

The total circulation of $ARB will be 10 billion. A total of 56% of those tokens will be controlled by the arbitrum community - 11.5% will be distributed to the Arbitrum community, and 1.1% will be distributed to DAOs operating in the Arbitrum ecosystem. Arbitrum DAO will control the distribution of the remaining community tokens through a treasury. 

The other 44% of Arbitrum's circulation will go to Offchain Labs - the firm that built Arbitrum. All investor and team tokens are subject to a 4-year lockup, with the first unlocking happening in one year and periodic unlocking throughout the next three.

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Eligibility for the $ARB Airdrop

The Arbitrum Foundation and Offchain Labs worked closely with Nansen throughout the past several months to develop eligibility criteria $ARB token airdrop.  They developed a point system based on various metrics of network usage. 

Users of both Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova both received points. Moreover, early users of Arbitrum One (before Nitro) received more points. Users with three or more points are eligible for the airdrop. However, points were also deducted from users who engaged in Sybil-linked usage patterns.

You can check the point system and discover more about the eligibility criteria here.

Users who want to be part of Arbitrum's governance but do not wish to vote on-chain actively can participate passively through delegation.

Furthermore, Arbitrum included a second mechanism in the form of DAO airdrops, as a way of extending token distribution to new and infrequent users. In accordance with this, only Arbitrum projects with DAO treasuries are eligible. 

“The goal of using a broad variety of criteria was recognizing that Arbitrum is home to a diversity of projects that have different KPIs and user interactions.,” Arbitrum maintained. “It is our hope and intention that by distributing tokens to Arbitrum DAOs, governance power will ultimately be shared with a broader variety of users than just those eligible for the user airdrop.”

Among the exceptions to the DAO airdrop was the inclusion of the Protocol Guild, an organization that represents the Ethereum core developers and contributors.

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Arbitrum Governance With $ARB

The ARB token will only be used for protocol governance, unlike ETH, which is used to pay Ethereum (and Arbitrum) fees. 

The DAO governance in Arbitrum is self-executing, which means its votes will directly effect and execute on-chain decisions without the involvement of an intermediary. The voting process requires a minimum of 21–37 days to pass before a proposal can be executed, ensuring users are given time to react to any changes.

Additionally, the Arbitrum Foundation established the Arbitrum Security Council, a 12-member multisig of ‘highly regarded community members’ that would monitor the security of the chains and can act rapidly when a vulnerability is found. At some point, the DAO can also retire the Security Council if it decides the chain no longer needs its protection.

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Launching Arbitrum Orbit 

The Arbitrum foundation also announced the launch of Arbitrum Orbit, a platform for developers to easily and permissionlessly create their own Layer 3 (L3) blockchains. Additionally, Arbitrum Orbit L3 chains will support Arbitrum Stylus, which allows developers to build chains in C, C++, Rust, as well as Solidity.

The Arbitrum DAO will be able to authorize additional Layer 2 chains on Ethereum, regardless of whether they are governed by $ARB, ensuring full community control of Arbitrum. 

The Arbitrum One platform was upgraded to Nitro in August. Moreover, a few months ago, Arbitrum announced that ten independent institutional validators had signed up to validate the platform. 

“With the tech mature and validation expanded, the next step toward decentralization is today’s launch: giving The Arbitrum Foundation and DAO ownership of the chain and the responsibility to foster and grow the Arbitrum ecosystem,” the Arbitrum Foundation said.

The community is exited with the recent announcement.

According to L2 Beat, Arbitrum has $3.63 billion in TVL in its Ethereum rollup network, Aribtrum One.

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What is Arbitrum:

Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer-2 network that enables developers to build and deploy highly scalable smart contracts at low cost. You can use Arbitrum chains to do all the things you do on Ethereum — use Web3 apps, deploy smart contracts, etc., but your transactions will be cheaper and faster. The flagship product for the team, Arbitrum Rollup, is an Optimistic rollup protocol that inherits Ethereum-level security.

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