• Arbitrum launches a new governance token, ARB, and makes plans for airdrop on March 23. 

• Plans have been put in place to prevent bots from taking advantage of the airdrops.

Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution on March 16, announced the launch of a self-executing DAO governance model and a new governance token, ARB, and an airdrop giveaway. The report explains that ARB tokens have an initial supply of 10 billion, and the system’s inflation will go for a maximum rate of 2 percent per year. 

Today, the Arbitrum Foundation is extremely excited to announce the launch of DAO governance for the Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks, alongside the launch of ARB.

The press release mentions that the ARB token is majority community-owned (~56 percent). Out of this, 12.75 percent would be distributed in the Arbitrum airdrop on March 23. This would be based on data taken on a snapshot on February 6, 2023. For the sake of transparency, the company is publishing a full list of airdrop recipients as well as the underlying criteria and data set.

According to the airdrop page, 42.78 percent of the initial supply would be allocated to the Arbitrum DAO treasury. 26.94 percent would also be allocated to the Offchain Labs Team and Future Team as well as the Advisors. 17.53 percent will go to the Offchain Labs investors. 11.62 percent would be allocated to the Users of the Arbitrum platform (via airdrop to user wallet addresses), and 1.13 percent would be given to the DAOs building apps on Arbitrum (via airdrop to DAO treasury addresses). 

The launch is the next step towards decentralization for Arbitrum

The company further explained that some recent or infrequent users were not included in the user airdrop. To capture them, a second mechanism to grant tokens to the community has been established termed: DAO airdrop. It is important to note that while users and DAO airdrop would be ready soon, investor and team tokens would be subjected to a four-year lockup. The first unlock will happen in one year with the remaining three years seeing monthly unlocks. Also, several anti-Sybil rules have been established to prevent bots from taking advantage of the ARB airdrop.

To accelerate this process and make sure that the community remains well represented in the early days, Offchain Labs team members have been instructed not to vote with their tokens, but they are encouraged to delegate them to community members, thereby putting more power in community delegates from the very beginning.

The ARB token launch is part of Arbitrum’s decentralization roadmap. It can be recalled that Arbitrum One was upgraded to Nitro in August. Months ago, it was disclosed that 10 independent institutional validators had signed up to validate Arbitrum one. The March 16 launch represents the next step towards decentralization.

Today’s launch isn’t only a milestone for Arbitrum; it’s a historic day for Ethereum scaling more broadly. The Ethereum community has been working for years towards building a secure and decentralized L2, and late last year, Vitalik Buterin proposed a 3-stage schema for classifying the maturity of rollups.

Just recently, another L2 project, Optimism, disclosed that it is launching a native governance token, optimism (OP), in April. 

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