Despite a messy governance dispute, Arbitrum’s native token – ARB – has emerged as one of the best-performing assets. The latest surge of more than 20% over the last 24 hours pushed the price to $1.573. During the same period, ARB’s trading volume increased by 204% to nearly $2 billion.
From whale accumulation to ramping up utility and market share, ARB appears to be on a bullish track.
There’s one interesting whale that used the surge in price as a cashing-in opportunity by purchasing 1.49 million ARB with 1,057 ETH (worth around $2.24 million) on April 14th, with an average buying price of $1.5. According to data from Lookonchain, this whale is well worth keeping an eye on.
Upon further investigation, the on-chain analyst found that the whale traded a total of 23 tokens, of which 15 are profitable, with a win rate of 65%, pushing the total profit above a whopping $7.3 million. Whales have been buying Arbitrum tokens continually, with one of them being Mechanism Capital’s Andrew Kang, who had raked in 1.51 million ARB at $1.23 with nearly $1.85 million of USDC.
On the utility side of things, the Arbitrum sequencer also generates cash flows for the treasury, which accrue value to the token even if they’re not distributed. Messari’s data show a revenue of $10 million in Q1, 2023, with a profit of $3.7 million. The profits will be poured into Arbitrum’s community-managed DAO, ArbitrumDAO.
Revenue, on the other hand, is expected to improve as adoption grows. To that extent, Messari Researcher Kunal Goel observed,
“While investing, growth prospects matter. Though it does not yet do so, the sequencer can also capture MEV in the future. Decentralized sequencing and $ARB staking will lock up supply and provide security.”
Arbitrum managed to outperform its top Ethereum L2 competitors. The latest data shows that it has exceeded Optimism on almost all the key metrics, capturing the market share of another popular Layer 2 blockchain which promises reduced fees and improved Ethereum compatibility.
The AIP-1 debacle has raised several questions, but the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution’s adoption level has been tremendous. Arbitrum’s TVL stands near its ATH of $2.31 billion, while that of Optimism is trailing behind at $949.21 million.
With just a 20% premium, the researcher further noted that ARB is “clearly undervalued compared to OP.”