Table of Contents:

· The half-year ARB airdrop claim has officially ended, following the “DAO funding gate” incident

· TVL fell below $5 billion, and the community launched a series of incentives

· The project party used incentives to conduct “ecological arbitrage”

BlockBeats news, on September 25, according to on-chain analyst Ember’s monitoring, the Arbitrum airdrop has been claimed at Ethereum block 18208000. Among them, 69,448,385 unclaimed ARBs, equivalent to approximately $56.54 million, have been transferred from the airdrop contract to the DAO Treasury.

The half-year ARB airdrop claim has officially ended, after the "DAO funding gate" incident raised questions

On the evening of March 16, Arbitrum officially announced the launch of DAO governance and governance tokens ARB for Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks, and announced the highly anticipated airdrop details.

According to the official announcement article released by the team, the initial total supply of Arbitrum tokens ARB is 10 billion, with a maximum annual inflation of 2%. In terms of token airdrops, 11.62% of the initial total supply will be airdropped to Arbitrum users, and 1.13% will be airdropped to DAO vaults built on Arbitrum applications.

Related reading: 《Arbitrum Announces Token Economics: Initial Total 10 Billion; 11.62% Airdropped to Users》

But just one month after the Arbitrum airdrop was launched, Arbitrum had a "DAO funding gate" incident, causing the community to question the degree of centralization of Arbitrum DAO.

According to BlockBeats, on April 2, a community blog post stated that the Arbitrum Foundation began selling ARB tokens in exchange for stablecoins before its token holder governance community "approved" the organization's nearly $1 billion budget, which caused community controversy. Previously, Arbitrum governance hawks called for the foundation's "special grant" plan.

According to the proposal, the foundation will receive 750 million ARB tokens (about $1 billion) and can be used without token holder approval. According to Patrick McCorry, the foundation had already begun using these tokens for the benefit of the DAO before the proposal was passed, including converting some funds into stablecoins for operational purposes.

On April 3, Arbitrum officials responded on social media to the recent community discussion of "the foundation selling coins before the Aip-1 proposal was voted through", saying that Arbitrum's decentralized governance is proceeding as planned, but many decisions must be made before the DAO is officially launched.

In addition, Arbitrum added that its foundation did not sell 50 million ARB in advance, of which 40 million ARB have been allocated as loans to mature participants in the financial market, and the remaining 10 million ARB have been converted into legal currency to pay operating costs.

On the day when Arbitrum officially responded, the decentralized gaming ecosystem TreasureDAO stated on its social platform that as the largest governance representative of the Arbitrum ecosystem, it has voted against the AIP-1 proposal put forward by the Arbitrum Foundation. Additionally, TreasureDAO asked Arbitrum to resubmit a proposal that more clearly spells out the scope of the special grant program and splits up the AIP-1 proposal.

On April 15, according to snapshot data, Arbitrum’s governance proposal to “return 700 million ARB to the DAO treasury” failed to pass the vote, with a total of 118 million ARB voted against, accounting for 84.01% of the total votes.

In an exclusive interview with BlockBeats in May, Arbitrum founder Ed Felten responded to the "DAO funding gate" incident and said that there was a misunderstanding between the community and the team, and the ARB tokens involved had not been transferred, and there was no transaction to transfer these tokens anywhere.

Related reading: 《Interview with Arbitrum founder: 3 people, 9 years, 2 billion market value》

“In short, my point is that the actions taken by the team are reasonable and fair, but due to poor communication, the expectations of the DAO community are different from the actual situation. But from another perspective, this also reflects a very good point, which is to show that the DAO does have control.

If someone thinks that the Arbitrum Foundation is just acting on its own will and that the opinions of the DAO are irrelevant, I believe this incident has shown them that the DAO has actual control. I hope that once AIP-1.1 and 1.2 pass the DAO’s on-chain vote, it will be clear that the foundation is following the DAO’s will move forward with the will of the DAO, while also making it clear that the Foundation is indeed responsible for the DAO. ”

On September 22, Arbitrum officially posted on social media that all unclaimed ARB airdrop tokens will be sent to the DAO treasury after the Ethereum network block height of 18208000 (approximately 2 days and 10 hours). Among them, there are 69,448,385 unclaimed ARB tokens, equivalent to approximately US$56.54 million.

TVL fell below $5 billion, and the community launched a series of incentives

BlockBeats reported in mid-September that according to public data, the Arbitrum network fell by 5.28% in a week. ARB has maintained a downward trend since it hit a high of $1.35 in mid-July. It once briefly fell below $0.74. In the past two months, it has fallen by about 45%, and the 24-hour drop has reached 10.46%. The TVL has fallen below $5 billion.

Since then, the Arbitrum team and community have launched a series of "incentive plans" in an effort to revive its ecological vitality.

BlockBeats reported on September 4 that the Arbitrum Incentive Working Group submitted the "Arbitrum Short-term Incentive Plan" AIP proposal in the Arbitrum Community Forum, which aims to allocate up to 75 million ARB rewards from the DAO treasury to active Arbitrum protocols to meet the short-term needs of the community.

On September 11, the Arbitrum community launched a proposal to "distribute 75 million ARB funding incentives to protocols with active Arbitrum ecosystems". The plan aims to meet short-term community needs and plans to allocate ARB owned by DAOs to incentive projects while ensuring transparent consensus and distribution methods. On the 18th, the proposal was passed with 0 votes against.

On September 20, Arbitrum officially announced that Odyssey will be back online next week. This Odyssey will cooperate with Web3 community event platform Galxe for a period of 7 weeks. Complete tasks and explore 13 projects on Arbitrum One to get custom badges. According to official documents, there will be no airdrops or rewards for the restart of Arbitrum Odyssey.

However, Arbitrum’s series of incentives have not brought about an improvement in its ecological activity. Arbitrum TVL has not grown significantly in the past few months. As of now, according to L2BEAT data, Arbitrum TVL is $5.6 billion and the ARB token price is $0.81. According to Dune Analytics data, most L2 networks have shown weak revenue growth in the past two months, among which Arbitrum’s revenue share has shrunk the most significantly.

BlockBeats reported on September 27 that Arbitrum announced on social platforms that its Odyssey event has been re-launched, and the first task has been launched on GMX. After completing the task, it will take a few days to prove the user's eligibility to apply for the NFT badge.

Project parties use incentives to conduct "ecological arbitrage"

After Arbitrum proposed incentives, many projects began to propose to the Arbitrum community to apply for ARB grant funding.

BlockBeats reported on September 21 that the cross-chain protocol Wormhole submitted a funding proposal to the Arbitrum community. The proposal aims to encourage users to mint native USDC on Arbitrum using Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) through Wormhole and its partners, with the goal of attracting 100 million USDC to migrate from other chains to Arbitrum within 12 weeks. To this end, Wormhole requested a grant of up to 2,500,000 ARB to provide users with an annualized return of up to 8%.

On September 26, cross-chain lending protocol Radiant Capital submitted a strategic proposal to Arbitrum DAO to further promote the growth of the ecosystem. Radiant applied for a fund between 52,126 and 3,359,302 ARB to expand its influence in three core areas: sticky liquidity, ecosystem enrichment, and future integration.

On the same day, the decentralized trading platform Trader Joe published a proposal in the Arbitrum community to apply for 1.83 million ARB grants from the Arbitrum DAO Treasury, which will be used to improve spot liquidity and trading efficiency, promote the development of the Arbitrum ecosystem, and attract more users to join the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Will Arbitrum's incentives attract more projects to settle in and help its ecosystem revitalize? BlockBeats will continue to follow up.

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