A week ago, the Ethereum layer two scaling solution Arbitrum announced the launch of its native token called ARB, and since then IOU markets have launched giving some indication of how much the token may be worth. ARB claiming begins March 23 and when people get their coins on exchanges, the token’s value may turn out to be a whole lot different. At present, ARB has been exchanging hands for $5.41 to $7.92 per unit over the past 24 hours.

ARB Token Sees IOU Trade Volume but Market Value May Shift Significantly After Real Tokens Start Trading

A new digital asset is entering the cryptocurrency economy after the layer two scaling solution Arbitrum announced the launch of its governance token last week. After the announcement, several centralized cryptocurrency exchanges launched IOU markets that people can trade, but only represent the market value of ARB before its launch.

ARB claiming begins March 23 and the Arbitrum airdrop is highly anticipated. The cryptocurrency market price aggregation website coinmarketcap.com (CMC) shows ARB’s current value via exchanges that have launched IOU markets. According to CMC data, the ARB IOU token reached an all-time high of $14.02 per unit on March 19.

Since then, the IOU token has dropped about 51.43% from its all-time high three days ago. ARB IOU tokens also recorded an all-time low at $2.81 per unit and current prices are 140% higher at $6.88 per coin. While 24-hour metrics show prices between $5.41 and $7.92, the IOU has seen $8.7 million in global trades over the last day. In that time, ARB markets lost nearly 8% against the U.S. dollar on Wednesday, 15 hours before ARB claiming begins.

The cryptocurrency analytics platform Dune Analytics shows several ARB airdrop tracking tools ready to go live on March 23. When claims begin, the tools feature counters highlighting the total ARB claimed, the number of unique ARB holders, and other allocation data.

The current IOU value of the ARB token is higher than Optimism’s native governance token OP. The current value of OP is about $2.53 per unit and there’s a circulating supply of 314,844,141 OP. As mentioned earlier, once real ARB tokens start trading then the market value may shift significantly, and the IOU token’s all-time high and low indicate that these changes are likely to continue for some time.

What are your thoughts on the upcoming ARB token airdrop and its potential impact on the cryptocurrency market? Share your opinions in the comments below.

Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.