Arbitrum airdropARB

What qualified participants did

1. Used Arbitrum One or Nova for qualifying actions before the snapshot.
2. Earned at least three points, with each qualifying action counted once and scores capped at 15.
3. Avoided the Sybil deductions, such as all activity inside a single 48-hour period.
4. Claimed ARB on the official claim page between March 23 and September 24, 2023.
5. Today: nothing can be claimed; treat any ARB claim offer as a scam.

Where things stand

The ARB airdrop is finished. The Arbitrum Foundation documentation states that the airdrop ran from March 23, 2023 to September 24, 2023, and that claiming is no longer live. The page that lists the eligibility rules says ARB "is no longer claimable". The ARB token is a governance token and trades on markets, but there is no open official claim.

The foundation documentation does not say what happened to unclaimed tokens, so we do not state it here. What it does publish is the token distribution: the initial supply cap is 10 billion ARB, with 35.28 percent to the ArbitrumDAO treasury, 26.94 percent to team, contributors and advisors, 17.53 percent to investors, 11.62 percent to users through the airdrop, 7.5 percent to the Arbitrum Foundation and 1.13 percent to DAOs.

Vesting also matters for context. Team and investor tokens have four-year lockups with the first unlock one year after the token generation event on March 16, 2023, then monthly unlocks. The Foundation allocation began a four-year linear unlock in April 2023.

How eligibility worked

Eligibility was a points system. Qualifying actions were mainly on Arbitrum One, with a smaller set on Arbitrum Nova. Each qualifying action counted at most once, only if performed before the February 6, 2023 snapshot, and scores were capped at 15. Points earned before the Nitro upgrade (August 31, 2022) were worth twice as much as later points, and a minimum of three points was needed to qualify.

Rewards scaled with points. Before the Nitro cutoff, the entitlement ran from 1,250 ARB for three points up to 10,250 ARB for twelve or more. Points earned after Nitro were worth half as much at the low end, starting at 625 ARB, with the same 10,250 ARB maximum.

Sybil handling was rule-based. One point was deducted if all of a wallet transactions occurred within a 48-hour period, and one point was deducted if the wallet balance was under 0.005 ETH and the wallet had interacted with no more than one smart contract. Wallets identified as Sybil addresses in the Hop protocol bounty programme were disqualified. Because the rules were published before the claim, they could be audited by anyone.

• Snapshot: February 6, 2023.
• Minimum three points; maximum score capped at 15.
• Pre-Nitro points counted double.
• Deductions for short activity windows and near-empty, single-contract wallets.

What participants did and the risks that remain

Eligible wallets connected to the official claim page during the six-month window and claimed ARB, which was then available on Arbitrum One. Wallet security was the main issue then and it remains so: claim sites were widely copied, and fake pages asked for approvals or seed phrases.

Nothing is claimable now, so a page asking you to connect and sign to receive ARB should be treated as hostile. Use only domains linked from the Arbitrum Foundation documentation, and never share a seed phrase.

What to take from this drop

The Arbitrum design rewarded breadth and age of usage rather than volume alone. Repeated identical actions did not add points, which made farming by repetition ineffective, while activity before the Nitro upgrade was worth more. That is a reasonable example of how projects try to reward early users.

The Sybil rules were mild compared with later airdrops: they deducted points rather than excluding wallets by clustering. If you are comparing programmes, note that the rules differ in how much they penalise multi-wallet behaviour.

This page is informational and not financial advice.