Unpacking ARB Tokens, Airdrop & Arbitrum DAO: Your Guide

With the establishment of the Arbitrum DAO, ARB token holders will be able to vote on important decisions regarding the Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks (technology improvements, token distribution to enhance the ecosystem, etc.). Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, believes the introduction of ARB will promote increased decentralization of the blockchain.

The well-known crypto analytics company Nansen was brought in to assess user activity and determine eligibility for the Arbitrum airdrop. The assessment considered factors such as transaction volume and frequency, interaction with smart contracts, and the amount of funds transferred on Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nitro. The details of this analysis are available in the Arbitrum Foundation documents. To find out if you are eligible and how many tokens you will receive, please visit this page. 

Users who receive ARB tokens will be able to utilize them immediately, but the investors and development team will have to wait for a four-year period before the tokens are unlocked. It will take a year before they can get their initial batch of tokens.

At present, only a few exchanges such as Bybit and Huobi have announced that they will list ARB. This list is likely to expand by March 23rd, as Arbitrum stands out as a leading layer-two solution in terms of total value locked (TVL). We recently wrote about this in a separate article on the successes of L2 solutions.

The total supply of ARB tokens is 10 billion. Of this, 11.62% will be distributed as an airdrop among network users, 1.13% will be spent on the DAO ecosystem, 17.53% will be distributed among investors, and 26.94% – among the development team. The remaining 42.78% of tokens will be held in the Arbitrum DAO treasury, and their fate will depend on future community decisions made through voting.

It should be mentioned that ARB will serve exclusively as a governance token within the Arbitrum ecosystem. Transaction fees in the network will be paid in ETH, similar to how it's done in Optimism, a competing L2 solution.

One of the key features of the Arbitrum DAO is its self-executing governance process. This implies that any decisions made will be carried out automatically through pre-programmed code, without relying on third parties. To ensure security, there will be a delay of 21 to 37 days before decisions are executed, during which the security council will check for vulnerabilities, errors, or any unlawful actions. The council will consist of 12 members, and for any modifications to be made, at least 9 of them must be involved.

Other innovations include the implementation of Arbitrum Orbit, which allows third-party applications and protocols to create new layer 3 networks based on Arbitrum's infrastructure.