Arbitrum's Highly-Anticipated Airdrop: The Wild Ride of ARB Token
Arbitrum's highly anticipated token airdrop has finally gone live, but not without causing a stir in the cryptocurrency market. The landing page for the project briefly crashed as the project opened the gates to its ARB token, along with Arbiscan, causing frustration for users. In the first 30 minutes following the opening of the claiming window, the blockchain explorer saw a record number of over 84,000 visitors
According to blockchain analytics firm Nansen, over 61% of eligible crypto wallets have already claimed their ARB tokens, leaving approximately 428 million tokens yet to be claimed. These tokens are valued at almost $596 million and represent 37% of the total 1.1 billion ARB allocated for Arbitrum's airdrop. Eligible addresses have 184 days to claim their tokens if they have not done so already.
The ARB token has generated considerable excitement in the market, with its price soaring as high as $11 on some exchanges during the first two hours of claiming period. However, the token's value has since dropped significantly, experiencing a 90% decline to as low as nearly $1 as investors rapidly dumped their tokens.
During the first hour of its claim, the ARB token traded for $3.99 on Uniswap DEX and above $5 on centralized exchanges like KuCoin, Kraken, and OKX, with a trading volume of over $20 million, according to CoinGecko. At ByBit, the token started trading for $7.50, but dropped to $1.50 within minutes. As of the time of this writing, ARB is trading at 1,47$ according to CoingGecko.
Nansen data also shows that out of 6.03 million ARB claimed by "smart money" wallets, $5.01 million were moved to a centralized or decentralized exchange, indicating a massive sell-off. The analytics firm puts "smart money" tags on addresses that trade in significant size and are usually active.
Despite the initial turbulence, the ARB token value of the token may yet increase as more investors claim their tokens. Therefore, the long-term prospects for the ARB token and the Arbitrum ecosystem is still to be seen in the nearest future.
