March 23, 2023
The long-awaited Arbitrum token (ARB) finally launched on Thursday, March 23.
- Over 625,143 wallets received the airdrop and it was trading at $3.99 on Uniswap
- Arbitrum, which started in 2021, is the largest layer 2 blockchain on Ethereum, achieving scalability by using a technique called transaction rollups, which sends batches of transactions to the Ethereum mainnet.
- ARB prices across all exchanges varied following the airdrop as prices reached as high as $14 on Bybit.
Let’s do a bit of analysis. Here’s an image of ARB’s total value locked (TVL) with data from DeFil Llama.
You’ll see that it stands at $1.99b, which is about double Optimism’s TVL. ARB’s market cap is also twice that of OP’s, so that means the market is rationally pricing these L2 coins.
But the story is different from MATIC. ARB has more TVL than MATIC, but less than 1/10th the market cap. The reason is that MATIC has a much larger ecosystem.
A growth story follows. If ARB’s market cap matched MATIC it would be 20B (= 11x return). Since it already has more TVL, that’s not an impossible outcome. Also, if Optimism’s recent activity is any indication then it is clear that ARB is likely to do extremely well.
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