- Liquidity providers earned over $542K in fees within hours of the launch of the ARB token airdrop.
- Arbitrum airdropped governance tokens after it launched a DAO as a step toward further decentralizing the network.
- Hackers use compromised vanity addresses to make away with $500000 worth of ARB tokens stolen from eligible users
Liquidity Providers to the highly anticipated ARB airdrop make profits of over $500 000 within the first few hours, as revealed by data.
On 16th March, Arbitrum announced the launch of decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance for the Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks, along with a governance token, ARB. The token would grant users and members of the DAO the right to vote on decisions that affect the future of the network.
To start the distribution of tokens, the network announced that selected members of the DAO based on defined criteria would be airdropped with 12.75% of the ARB token supply on Thursday, 23rd March.
According to Uniswap, when the tokens went live for claiming on Thursday, upwards of $180 million worth of volume was traded on the ARB/ETH liquidity pool, which earned liquidity providers over $542,000 in fees.
Super Airdrop Hunters
As the airdrop went on, on-chain data revealed that two airdrop hunters collected tokens totaling about $3 million from 1,496 wallets into two wallets.
Lookonchain, a blockchain analysis platform, reported that 1.4 million ARB were received from 866 addresses by one wallet. To provide liquidity, the account added all of the ARB it had received to the decentralized exchange Uniswap.
At the time of writing, the 1.4 million ARB tokens are valued almost $1.8 million. On the other hand, a different wallet received 933,375 ARB valued at about $1.17 million from 630 addresses.
This scenario attracted mixed reactions from the Twitter community, with some praising their efforts while others speculated that team members of the project might hold the wallets. Others feared that there would be a massive drop in traffic, saying:
“This means that the transaction volume will drop significantly since these are basically all fake traffic. Will be interesting to see where it’s at 1-2 months after the airdrop.”
Hackers Onboard
While the eligible members of the DAO gathered their tokens, hackers also entered the airdrop party. According to reports, hackers used compromised vanity addresses to steal $500,000 worth of ARB tokens during the airdrop on Thursday.
A vanity address is a unique cryptocurrency address with the words or phrases the user has selected to make it more distinctive and personal.
The reports explained that the tokens were taken by a hacker who collected vanity addresses that qualified to receive ARB tokens, then used vanity address generators to create similar addresses.
The attacker then sent the airdropped tokens to those addresses instead of the legitimate ones. As a result of the hacking of these vanity addresses, the owners of the legitimate addresses are unable to retrieve their ARB tokens.
The token airdrop by Arbitrum generated a lot of buzz and excitement among users. At the time of writing, about 163 million ARB tokens are still up for grabs, based on the blockchain analytics of Nansen.
Additionally, over 91,658 eligible addresses, about 14.6%, are yet to claim their token. This total includes the hacked addresses whose owners can no longer claim their tokens and most of those who do not know what to do concerning the issue.
