Arbitrum Earmarks 112M ARB Tokens For Ecosystem DAOs

Highly Anticipated Airdrop Will Be Claimable On March 23

DeFi protocols will soon control a significant share of the circulating supply for Arbitrum’s imminent native token.

On Tuesday, the leading Ethereum Layer 2 network said that ecosystem DAOs will receive 112M ARB, roughly 10% of the 1.15B tokens earmarked for the airdrop.

“We’re giving over the ecosystem and control of the chains and their technology to Ethereum,” Steven Goldfeder, the co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, told The Defiant.

It will be up to Arbitrum’s top DeFi and GameFi teams to decide how those tokens will be distributed or utilized on behalf of their respective communities.

The top DAO recipients include Arbitrum-native leaders like perpetuals trading platform GMX and gaming ecosystem Treasure, with 8M tokens each. Cross-chain behemoths like Uniswap and Sushi are getting 4.3M ARB apiece, and Curve will receive 3.5M tokens. In total, 139 projects will receive between 75,000 and 8M ARB tokens.

Only projects with a DAO and a governance token directing treasury management qualified for the airdrop. Arbitrum determined the size of token allocations based on whether a project is multi-chain or Arbitrum-native, the date a protocol was deployed on Arbirum, and the transaction volumes and TVL of the dApp, alongside other factors.

“[The airdrop] is intended to localize the governance so that each sub-community on Arbitrum can determine what is best for their contribution to the community,” Arbitrum said. “It is our hope and intention that by distributing tokens to Arbitrum DAOs, governance power will ultimately be shared with a broader variety of users than just those eligible for the user airdrop.”

Arbitrum added that it plans to launch a grants program in the near future, providing the network’s protocols with additional opportunities to secure ARB allocations.

On March 17, Arbitrum announced its long-awaited airdrop, which will be claimable tomorrow.