In a major DeFi news story last week, one of the most popular layer-2 Ethereum scaling solutions, Arbitum announced that it is officially transitioning to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and will be airdropping its native crypto token, which will be used for governance purposes in the DAO.

The Arbitrum Foundation on March 16 announced that ARB, Arbritrum’s new token, will be airdropped to community members on Thursday, March 23.

Also, according to the Arbitrum Foundation blog post, the ARB launch will mark Arbitrum's official transition into a DAO. Arbitrum was one of the only few layer-2 scaling projects on the Ethereum network that did not have its own token. All the others like Optimism and Polygon had their respective tokens and DAOs. Now, ARB holders will be enabled to vote on key decisions regarding the governance of Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova - the networks that allow users to transact on the Ethereum blockchain with far greater speeds and significantly lower fees.

The Arbitrum Foundation in a statement said,

“Arbitrum DAO will have the power to control key decisions at the core protocol level, from how the chain's technology is upgraded to how the revenue from the chain can be used to support the ecosystem.”

According to a report by CoinDesk, ARB’s total token circulation will number 10 billion ARB. The Arbitrum community will control 56% of the total ARB tokens, out of which 11.5% of the total supply will be granted to eligible Arbitrum users through an airdrop, and 1.1% to DAOs that operate in the Arbitrum ecosystem. The rest of the community tokens will go to a treasury controlled by the new Arbitrum DAO, which will allow ARB holders to vote on how to disburse the funds in the ecosystem.

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The remaining 44% of ARB's total circulation will go to investors and employees of Offchain Labs - the development firm that built Arbitrum, which will be subject to lock-up periods and vesting schedules.

According to data from Arbitrum blockchain explorer arbiscan.io, Arbitrum's daily transaction number has been on a rising trajectory and is at one of its highest points in history.

Alongside that, Arbitrum's unique addresses chart is also scripting newer highs every day, jumping ahead by leaps and bounds as more and more people are beginning to join its ecosystem and participate in it.

Arbitrum's airdrop has garnered so much excitement in the industry that crypto Futures exchange behemoth, BitMEX also launched an ARB Futures contract with up to 20x leverage option on the trading pairs offered.

These are wholly speculative as the underlying hasn't even been airdropped to prospective community members and is slated to happen on March 23, according to the Arbitrum Foundation. It is yet to be seen how the airdrop pans out and how the prices react after the token is airdropped to members of the ARB community. The last major airdrop happened exactly about a year ago when BAYC and MAYC NFT holders were airdropped Apecoin (APE) tokens ahead of its metaverse launch called 'Otherside'.  

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