Today, March 23 at 1:00 pm EST, Arbitrum (ARB) will start trading on Binance. The launch of the airdrop is likely the biggest DeFi event since the Uniswap airdrop three years ago. Around 635,000 wallets qualified for the airdrop and could initially cause massive volatility in the ARB price.
Until the listings, it is not known at what price the Arbitrium token will actually launch. What is clear, however, is that ARB’s total supply is ten billion, according to the Arbitrum Foundation, of which 1.275 billion ARB will be unlocked on launch day. The rest will remain locked for at least one year.
Based on this, forecasts assume that ARB could launch at a price of $15 per token, as Guillermo Daniel Salazar, co-founder at StablePay.io, recently estimated via Twitter – although some estimates are significantly lower.
In comparison, Optimism (OP) launched last year with a total supply of about 4.3 billion OP, with only 315 million being released into circulation. Within the first hour of trading, the Arbitrum token reached a max price of $2.31.
How To Trade The Arbitrum (ARB) Airdrop
Based on previous airdrops, some analysts are trying to predict how to trade today’s ARB airdrop. One of them is Miles Deutscher, who has looked at the last three major airdrops: BLUR, Aptos (APT) and Optimism (OP), to derive patterns from them.
According to him, there is a clear underlying pattern to observe. At the beginning, the price of the airdrop token shoots up. After that, there is a gradual sell-off as the recipients of the airdrop sell their tokens. Once this selling pressure subsides and the sell side is exhausted, an explosive recovery occurs.
Deutscher shared the charts below that confirm this pattern, but cautioned that the Arbitrum token may not necessarily follow the same trend from previous airdrops. “It’s just interesting to observe the similarities between previous patterns. If you’re trading, it’s a risky game (especially with leverage),” Deutscher concluded.
The popular Twitter analyst “Mac” has also analyzed the patterns of recent airdrops. His analysis is a bit different. He thinks ARB will see a dump candle for a few hours after launch at most, when market makers and airdrop claimers sell their tokens.
Once the airdrop claim reaches 60-80%, the analyst expects a bounce – this is the time to buy. However, he believes this will be a short-lived pump of a few days maximum, similar to UNI and BLUR. For Mac, who shared the UNI chart below, this is the time to sell.
Following that, the analyst says there will be a distribution phase, followed by a re-accumulation, where he sees another entry point. “The real pump starts. This is where the real money will be made,” the analyst stated.