Traders Confuse ARbit With Arbitrum Causing It To Surge 2,000% Ahead Of The ARB Token Airdrop

Updated: 23 March 2023

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Crypto traders have been mistakenly trading a dead token called ARbit, thinking it was Arbitrum token (ARB) whose airdrop went live on Thursday.

What: ARbit token surges 2000% after investors confused it with Arbitrum.

Why: Investors were excited about Arbitrum’s airdrop which went live a few hours ago.

What Next: Users have six months to claim their tokens by directly interacting with the smart contract.

A dead token ARbit (ARB) has been pumping over the last week as traders mistakenly thought it was Arbitrum. The latter’s airdrop of its native token ARB went live on Thursday.

Market participants fueled a 2,000% spike in the price of the ARbit (ARB) token thinking it was ARB, the native token of Arbitrum, an Ethereum scaling blockchain. The token went ballistic from $0.00024 to a peak of $0.027 over an eight-day period.

The 24-hour trading volume remains relatively high, standing at $11,866 up 20.3% on the day, according to data from CoinMarketCap. This is an illustration that traders usually make basic mistakes when it comes to crypto trading.

There is no doubt that traders were expecting to trade the ARB token, which is the token that is used for Arbitrum.

Such mistakes are not uncommon. In February, traders pumped and dumped the BASE token following an announcement by the U.S.-based crypto exchange Coinbase that is building its own Layer 2 network on Ethereum. The price of BASE, a token pegged to the total crypto market cap at a ratio of 1:1 trillion, surged 350% from $0.864 to $5.34 between February 20 and 23, after which it fell because traders realized that it was the wrong token. BASE currently trades at $0.67.

Over 467M Arbitrum Tokens Claimed In Three Hours

The Arbitrum airdrop which went live on March 23 has had the crypto community excited over the past few days. Over 1 billion ARB tokens are to be distributed to 625,000 addresses. The minimum airdrop value is 625 ARB, and the maximum is 10,250 ARB.

To claim your stake in Arbitrum DAO governance, click on the link below. We look forward to the community participating in governance, delegating, being delegates, and contributing to the future of Arbitrum One and Nova! ??https://t.co/GaezTtdLib

— Arbitrum (?,?) (@arbitrum) March 23, 2023

According to data from Nansen, more than 467 million ARB tokens were claimed within the first three hours of the Airdrop after it went live earlier today.

Total Arbitrum tokens claimed — **Source**: Nansen

240,880 unique wallets had claimed the airdrop, representing 31.7% of all eligible wallets.

ARB has a total supply of 10 billion, according to technical documents. It traded at just over $1.40 at the time of this writing on March 23.

The much-awaited Arbitrum token made its market debut trading at $3.99 on Uniswap as volatility surged on decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

The Arbitrum Foundation told investors that they would have 6 months to claim their tokens warning of increased gas fees and server congestion during the airdrop.

Remember #Arbinauts, you have 6 months to claim your tokens! Gas fees will be quite high, and there will be server congestion.

— Arbitrum (?,?) (@arbitrum) March 23, 2023

As expected, Arbitrum’s website and blockchain scanner was down ahead of the ARB token claim event as interest from users increased exponentially. “This Serverless Function was rate limited,” a prompt on the site stated.