While Arbitrum plans to launch its ARB governance token on March 23, the community has already started selling the tokens they expect to receive during the upcoming airdrop.
Twitter users are speculating on the possible prices of ARB on over-the-counter (OTC) markets that offer peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading at prices set by transaction participants. Crypto traders are betting on the price of the new token in hopes to benefit from the price difference after the official launch.
For instance, some Twitter users claim they have bought the token for $0.98, while others have seen it sold for $1.44. On the other hand, there are traders who are sure that the price can exceed $5 or even $10.
Meanwhile, some users doubt that purchasing the Arbitrum token before the airdrop is technically possible, being convinced that ARB is non-transferable and requires the purchase of a wallet that already has another owner of its private key.
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Who is eligible for the Arbitrum airdrop?
By distributing 11.62% of all ARB tokens (1.162 billion tokens) the team behind Arbitrum aims to hand over protocol governance to its users in hopes to increase decentralization of the network. At the same time, Arbitrum wants its airdrop to reward loyalty among early adopters. In order to distribute funds fairly, the protocol will use a scoring system to evaluate eligibility for the airdrop and prioritize those who have been using Arbitrum for a longer time.
According to the rules published in the official governance documents, Arbitrum will give points for different types of actions performed by users in the past that involved one of the two networks: Arbitrum Nova and the Arbitrum One mainnet. Since Arbitrum primarily wants to incentivize the long-term use of its solutions, it has included more activities that qualify Arbitrum One users for the airdrop and doubled the points for these activities.
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For Arbitrum Nova, the only activities that can score points are bridging funds and conducting transactions. The same actions as well as interactions with smart contracts and depositing liquidity are additional actions that can earn Arbitrum One users some extra points.
Although Arbitrum's governance documentation appears to be comprehensive and clear, some users have complained about not being eligible for the airdrop despite conducting multiple transactions, and others have expressed dissatisfaction with the number of tokens they can receive.
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"Excited and also disappointed with the amount I got compared to OP that was a truly by product, with ARB I spent deliberate hours of time and yet received half the amount if we look at the tokenomics and apply the difference in ratio of total supply... Instead of holding, I will sell with 10 billion max supply and so few tokens," YouTube user Hogsihi Breslerman commented on the Bankless Shows episode dedicated to ARB airdrop.
The Blockworks Research team, which specializes in digital asset analysis, has published a list of 625,143 addresses eligible for the ARB airdrop at press time. According to this data, 23.5% of all addresses will receive free tokens.
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Still, some YouTube commenters are furious that Arbitrum blacklisted many eligible wallets for allegedly being airdrop hunters and Sybils. Indeed, Arbitrum has implemented anti-Sybil rules aimed at protecting the network against a Sybil attack, which is a type of a dishonest tactic employed by some users who farm airdrop activity from multiple wallets in order to maximize their rewards.
Some of Arbitrum's anti-Sybil regulations include deducting points for the newest wallets that will appear within 48 hours before the airdrop, as well as those with a wallet balance of less than 0.005 ETH and a single transaction or no transactions at all.
"While the Arbitrum Foundation did its absolute best to include a wide variety of genuine Arbitrum users in the airdrop, invariably some recent or infrequent users were not included in the user airdrop, and indeed discerning between a new user and an airdrop farmer was generally very difficult," Arbitrum admitted in its March 16 Twitter thread, adding that it also has additional DAO airdrop to reward active community members.
"There are many amazing teams and companies contributing to the ecosystem, the goal here is not to reward projects for their contributions, but to really allow all sub-communities within the Arbitrum ecosystem to have a voice," the team explained, promising that the Arbitrum Foundation will announce its grant programs for the projects without community governance or DAO.
