​​Arbitrum Airdrop Traffic Crashes Website and Blockchain Scanner

High levels of network congestion caused Arbitrum’s main website and blockchain scanner Arbitrum to crash shortly after the airdrop went live.

The widely anticipated Arbitrum airdrop went live on Thursday, with users claiming over 42 million ARB tokens within the first hour.

The influx of users looking to claim their tokens caused the Arbitrum website to crash, with webpages returning 404 and 429 errors which correspond to “page not found” and “too many requests.” 

The congestion on the main website led users to alternative sources like blockchain explorer Arbiscan. Users can claim their airdrop tokens by using the claim function from the contract.

Still, the overwhelming amount of user traffic caused Arbiscan to briefly go down as well. At one point, the service had 84,826 users online over a span of 30 minutes.

For context, this is multiples higher than @etherscan peak traffic last year…

— Arbiscan.io (@arbiscan) March 23, 2023

Despite the issues, more than 20,000 wallets had claimed 42 million ARB tokens within the first hour. These users likely interacted with the smart contract directly to claim their tokens. 

At the time of writing, more than 69% of the ARB tokens have been claimed, according to data from Nansen. Around 420,000 wallets had claimed 797 million ARB tokens.

ARB traded at a peak price of $11.80 immediately after its launch, but has since lost 88% of its value as market participants sold off the token. Nansen’s dashboard of smart money addresses shows that over 11.6 million ARB has been sent to decentralized exchanges and 3.7 million ARB to centralized exchanges. 

The large amount of sell pressure resulted in a swift drop in price for the token. Only one address managed to sell at a price of $10.29 through the ARB/USDC pool on Uniswap, transaction data shows. Some addresses sold ARB when it traded around $4.50, but the majority of trading activity commenced only when the price was well below the $1.50 mark.