Arbitrum unveils ARB token airdrop to convert its protocol to DAO

The Arbitrum Foundation, in collaboration with Offchain Labs, has declared March 23 as D-day, for the airdrop of its new governance token for Arbitrum. The newly launched ARB token will give the holders exclusive rights to vote on advancements in the prominent Ethereum (ETH) layer two landscape.

ARB airdrop

Ethereum’s leading layer 2 network, Arbitrum, announced that it will release its new governance token. ARB is expected to change its management to adopt a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The token holders will have the power to vote on critical changes in Arbitrum one and Arbitrum Nova.

The network controlled by Offchain Labs will adopt a new decision-making mode through the community members. It means that Ed Felten and his associates who co-founded the company will not have autonomous powers to make decisions but agree with community members when making changes.

“The ARB holders will gain powers to make important decisions at the center of the protocol,”

Arbitrum Foundation noted.

In addition, the chain technology will pass through an upgrade to ensure the revenue collected from the chain helps assist the ecosystem.

Distribution of tokens

Arbitrum’s strategy is to give 44% of the tokens to investors and significant contributors. The remaining 56% will go to the Arbitrum community.

Arbitrum contracted Nansen, a renowned analytics firm, to distribute the token to the users. The token distributed to each user will be commensurate with the number of transactions done, the applications used, and the time one uses the network.

The foundation plans to distribute 10 billion tokens to the community, users, and investors.

Information gathered by trust nodes indicates that only one out of three users has received 1,000 tokens, as reported by Nansen. The numbers show that almost 70% of users are yet to obtain any token. This amounts to more than 2 million addresses.

Significance of ARB token

In a statement, the core developers of the Arbitrum network, Offchain Labs, indicated that the ARB token is crucial in ensuring the Arbitrum ecosystem is highly decentralized compared to other chains. “The company will become a service provider and execute the orders made by DAO,” said Steven Goldfeder, Offchain Labs CEO.

The ARB holders will have the autonomy to alter the code directly. In addition, the security council will also be able to fix any bugs expeditiously.

The announcement comes after Optimism, the primary competitor of Arbitrum, launched its OP token about one year ago, which enabled the company to change to DAO governance.

Future of Arbitrum

Arbitrum has witnessed a decent level of adoption since its launch, surpassing even Ethereum in transaction volume last month.

At the time of writing, Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol, with $3.72 billion in total value locked (TVL), according to L2 Beat.