Over 300M Arbitrum ARB tokens claimed; price plunges 90%

Arbitrum’s newly airdropped token ARB price dropped by around 90% to $1.20 as investors rapidly dumped their token, according to CryptoSlate’s data.

During the first hour of its claim, the ARB token traded for $3.99 on decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap and above $5 on centralized exchanges like KuCoin, Kraken, and OKX. During the period, the token’s trading volume was over $20 million, according to CoinGecko.

On-chain sleuth Lookonchain identified one trader that sold 800 ARB for over $3,600 — it means this trader sold at an average price of over $4. The crypto analyst added that this could “possibly [be] the highest selling price.”

ARB prices can be expected to be volatile during these early hours of its claim as more eligible users claim their airdrop.

Arbitrum’s website briefly crashed

Arbtrum’s website temporarily crashed under a heavy server load because thousands of people were simultaneously trying to claim their airdrops.

The layer-2 network had anticipated this issue when it announced the airdrop. The project reminded eligible users that they still had six months to claim their tokens. “Gas fees will be quite high, and there will be server congestion,” it added.

The claim page was back online at the time of writing.

Besides the official website, Arbiscan — a data aggregation platform for the layer2 network — also briefly went down due to the heavy load.

Over 300 million tokens claimed

Blockchain analytical firm Nansen’s dashboard shows that over 160,000 addresses have claimed over 300 million ARB tokens as of press time. This represents 27% of the airdrop supply for individual network users.

The popular layer2 solution had seen an uptick in its number of transactions and addresses as the community anticipated the arrival of its ARB token.