Absolute community control over Arbitrum has now been achieved!
On March 23, Arbitrum will airdrop a governance token with the ticker ARB to its community members. This puts the project one step closer to complete decentralization.
The Arbitrum Foundation claims that the release of ARB will officially usher in Arbitrum's transformation into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), giving holders of ARB the right to cast votes on important decisions affecting the One and Nova networks, which enable faster and cheaper transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.
The action follows a suggestion made by Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, who outlined the necessary procedures to enable optimistic rollups to remove their training wheels and become fully decentralized.
The airdrop will distribute tokens to users who have used the network in the preceding year, in accordance with governance papers and a recently drafted constitution. The airdrop will represent 12.75 percent of the token's total supply. No network transaction costs will be paid using the token.
L2 Beat figures show that Arbitrum has more than a 55% financial stake in the layer 2 market.
The token drop has been announced by Offchain Labs, the startup behind Arbitrum, although distribution won't start for another week.
The shift is significant since Arbitrum will now have a self-executing DAO as its form of governance. This suggests that governance participants will be able to submit protocol amendments that will be automatically applied on-chain. Offchain Labs has done this by deciding on a more extreme kind of decentralization.
In order to reward legitimate users rather than those who sought to cheat the system, Offchain Labs worked with crypto data provider Nansen to set the standards for who should receive the airdrop.
