Arbitrum to airdrop ARB tokens to users on March 23

Ethereum (ETH) layer2 (L2) solution Arbitrum is set to airdrop ARB tokens to its community members on March 23.

The Arbitrum Foundation said in a March 16 statement that the L2 solution would be pivoting into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that the ARB token would govern.

This means that ARB holders would be allowed to make decisions that impact the operations and governance of the Arbitrum ecosystem.

“The $ARB token will facilitate the decentralization of the Arbirum network, and the $ARB airdrop will place the governance token in the hands of the users who are actively participating in the Arbitrum ecosystem.”

The ARB token

The ARB token has a total circulating supply of 10 billion. The developers said the community owns 56% of this supply — of which 12.75% would be airdropped to individual wallets and DAOs operating within the ecosystem on March 23, according to a Medium post.

The airdrop would be shared based on a February 26 snapshot taken by the developers.

“The majority of the $ARB supply will be under the control of the Arbitrum community via The Arbitrum Foundation, accelerating growth of the ecosystem organically. $ARB token holders will govern The Arbitrum Foundation through the Arbitrum DAO.”

The developers wrote that Arbitrum’s DAO governance process is self-executing, meaning the DAO’s votes about on-chain actions would be effected simultaneously. To mitigate against rushed decisions, voting would take a minimum of 21 days.

Meanwhile, the Arbitrum foundation has also set up a 12-man council of highly regarded community representatives tasked with ensuring the chain’s security and acting in the event of a security vulnerability.

Arbitrum’s developer Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder, said the introduction of the Security Council and other features showed that the project wants to be at the forefront of a decentralized financial system.

Arbitrum is the dominant L2 network. The scaling solution controls over 55% of the total value of assets locked across the layer-2 market. Besides that, the project has seen increased interest recently, processing more transactions than Ethereum’s mainnet twice.

(Updated with more information about ARB token)