The recently airdropped token, ARB, which powers the Arbitrum Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), experienced extreme volatility in trading on Thursday.
Arbitrum, the prominent layer-2 scaling solution on the Ethereum blockchain that offers fast and cheap transactions, officially became a DAO on Thursday after airdropping just over 1 billion of its ARB token to network users.
According to TradingView, citing Kraken data, ARB/USD rallied as high at $9 per token before dumping as low as $1.1 within as little as one hour.
Prices reportedly reached as high as $14 per token on ByBit.
ARB/USD was last moving sideways around $1.35 per token, giving it a market cap of around $1.7 billion and making it the 40th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.
Arbitrum’s ARB token has a maximum supply of 10 billion, meaning its fully diluted market capitalization at current prices is around $13.5 billion, which would make it the nineth largest cryptocurrency by fully diluted market capitalization.
At earlier highs in the $9 to $14 per token range, Arbitrum’s fully diluted market capitalization would have been a massive $90 to $140 billion, between 15-24% of Bitcoin’s.
Yes, Arbitrum is an impressive, fast-growing protocol, with daily transactions spiking to a new record high this week above 1.2 million.
But to be worth 15-24% of Bitcoin is probably a stretch at this point.
In that sense, it probably should come as a surprise that ARB tokens were subsequently dumped onto the market as airdrop participants sought to cash in.
Additionally, Arbitrum’s website and blockchain scanner both crashed amid a surge in users trying to access the sites when the airdrop went live.
This could have spooked some airdrop
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