- Daily active users and total transactions on Arbitrum reached new highs on Monday.
- Yet Arbitrum’s governance token is down 58% from its all-time high earlier in the year.
- Arbitrum is still the top Ethereum layer 2 blockchain by total value of crypto assets, daily transactions, and daily active users.
As transaction fees hit their lowest level on Ethereum in years, Arbitrum, a layer 2 network built on top of Ethereum, reached an all-time high in activity.
The daily number of active addresses on Arbitrum soared to an all-time high of 856,000 on Monday, up 150% from the 341,000 recorded at the start of May.
This surge pushed Arbitrum past Solana’s 833,000 daily active users, despite the recent popularity on Solana driven by the memecoin trading frenzy.
This comes as Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade went live on March 15, lowering the transaction costs on Ethereum layer 2 blockchains by as much as 99%.
A week prior to the upgrade, the number of transactions on Arbitrum was only 747,000, and a week after that, the number jumped to 1.5 million, before hitting the high on Monday.
The Arbitrum DAO also recently made public its plans to invest 35 million ARB tokens in stable, liquid assets.
This resulted in more than two dozen companies pitching potential products, including heavyweights Franklin Templeton, the trillion-dollar asset manager, and Securitize, the company helping BlackRock on its quest to tokenise assets.
Despite these major developments, the total value of crypto assets on Arbitrum has declined 22% to $15.7 billion from an all-time high of $20 billion on April 1.
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Trading volumes on Arbitrum’s decentralised exchanges have fallen 82% to $404 million from a peak of $2.2 billion on March 4.
The price of Arbitrum’s governance token, ARB, hasn’t fared well either.
ARB hit an all-time high of $2.26 on January 11 and came close again on March 7, reaching $2.17. Since January, however, the token has declined by 58%, now trading at $0.94. In contrast, Ethereum has risen by about 10% during the same period.
One reason for ARB’s lagging price may be the large token unlock by Offchain Labs, the development team behind Arbitrum, and its investors.
On March 15, about $1.2 billion worth of ARB tokens were unlocked and distributed to these groups. Those tokens were vested for one year.
Still, Arbitrum is the preferred layer 2 blockchain by total bridged Ether.
According to data as of April 28, just over 1.7 million Ether was transferred to Arbitrum, while Arbitrum’s 14 largest layer 2 competitors saw only around 1.5 million Ether bridged to their blockchains.
Ryan Celaj is a data correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at ryan@dlnews.com.
