The Arbitrum Foundation, responsible for the development of the Arbitrum blockchain, announced a significant transfer of 69 million unclaimed ARB tokens to its treasury. This move comes after the claim period for these tokens ended over the weekend.
According to technical documents, these unclaimed rewards make up 0.69% of ARB’s total supply of 10 billion. At current market prices, the value of these tokens exceeds $59 million.
Data from Dune Analytics indicates that 93% of eligible users claimed their tokens. The ARB tokens were initially airdropped to eligible users in late March, garnering a massive community response. Within hours of going live, over 42 million tokens were claimed by 23,000 unique users. Airdrops in the crypto world refer to the automatic transfer of tokens from projects to users.
Moreover, a governance vote in August led to a near-unanimous decision to transfer these unclaimed tokens to the Arbitrum treasury. The proposal, put forth by community member yoav.eth, received a staggering 99.96% approval from token holders. Consequently, Arbitrum’s treasury now holds nearly $3 billion worth of ARB tokens.
Arbitrum and Optimism take different paths on unclaimed tokens
Unlike its rival, Optimism, Arbitrum chose not to distribute the unclaimed tokens directly to eligible users. Earlier this month, Optimism distributed around 49 million unclaimed OP tokens from its first airdrop in June 2022. Last week, Optimism also announced its third OP airdrop, allocating 19.4 million OP tokens to 31,870 addresses.
Both Arbitrum and Optimism have seen a decline in their daily average transactions since the launch of the Coinbase-incubated Layer 2 network, Base, in August. According to data from The Block, Base’s seven-day moving average daily transaction count reached 921,000 on September 24. This compares to Arbitrum’s 603,000 and Optimism’s 334,000.
Following the announcement, the price of Arbitrum’s governance token fell nearly 1.5% to $0.81 before recovering. It is currently trading at $0.82, according to CoinGecko data. The Arbitrum DAO treasury now holds a substantial 3.6 billion ARB tokens, valued at $2.9 billion, as per on-chain data.
While the community overwhelmingly supported the move, it remains to be seen how these funds will be utilized in the future.