Arbitrum, the biggest player in Ethereum’s layer 2 scaling landscape, is finally getting a token.
The Arbitrum Foundation said on Thursday that ARB, Arbritrum’s new token, will be airdropped to community members on Thursday, March 23.
According to the Arbitrum Foundation, ARB will mark Arbitrum’s official transition into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), meaning ARB holders will be able to vote on key decisions governing Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova – networks that allow users to transact on the Ethereum blockchain with greater speeds and lower fees.
“Arbitrum DAO will have the power to control key decisions at the core protocol level, from how the chain's technology is upgraded to how the revenue from the chain can be used to support the ecosystem,” the Arbitrum Foundation said in a statement.
Although the Arbitrum Foundation plans to grant a relatively high number of tokens to investors and core contributors (44%), Arbitrum’s creator – Offchain Labs – boasts that the ARB token will make the Arbitrum ecosystem more decentralized than alternative scaling chains.
“For me, the most exciting part is the decentralization – the fact that Offchain Labs will no longer have any control over the future of this chain,” Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder told CoinDesk. “We will be a service provider, and if the DAO calls on us to build software, we will.”
