Mooners and Shakers: Bitcoin Stable Around $28k; Arbitrum falls in the middle of governance drama

by James · April 2, 2023

Morning coin heads. Another week, another bunch of Satoshis? If you stack and hold Bitcoin, then yes. How is tracking? That seems to have made the USD 28k a sort of support for now.

However, when it comes to the recently (partially) airdropped Arbitrum token (ARB), it is one of the biggest dippers. And that’s because of some serious concerns, and poor miscommunication, around the Layer 2 Ethereum Scaling Project’s very first DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) governance proposal.

Why has there been a drama? Because it involves the allocation and use of around $1 billion worth of ARB – that is, 750 million tokens.

ARB is a governance token designed to allow holders/community members of the DAO to vote on proposals, such as AIP-1, that deal with structural changes to the DAO and the project’s foundation.

Long story short, the Arbitrum Foundation has been heavily criticized by many members of the Arbitrum DAO who felt their input regarding the proposed allocation of the 750 million ARB tokens was ignored.

Here’s a look at it…

The vote for AIP-1 (Arbitrum Improvement Proposal) had swung to a signaling majority not-approval (it’s currently 82% against). And yet, what seemed like a red flag to many happened when it became clear that the foundation had already spent/derivated more than 50 million ARB tokens regardless of the DAO vote.

The Arbitrum Foundation has since released a statement addressing the concerns and admitting it could have communicated the plans better. It also explained that some decisions had to be made before the public launch of Arbitrum and that 40 million of the tokens were “allocated as a loan to a sophisticated player in the financial market space” with the remaining 10 million converted to fiat for operating costs.

According to the Arbitrum Foundation, AIP-1 was intended to be “a ratification of the initial setup of both the Arbitrum DAO and the Foundation created to serve the DAO”. Confusing, isn’t it? Bad communication? 100%.

This seems to have satisfied some, but certainly not all members of the Arbitrum DAO community.

At the time of writing, the ARB token is down approximately 8% in the last 24 hours and is trading at $1.19.

Table of Contents

Top 10 overview

With the total crypto market capitalization at $1.22 trillion, down about 1% since this time yesterday, here is the current status of the top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

It was a pretty quiet weekend for crypto all (well, some) things considered. And that despite the growing fear that influential US politicians are really into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies – and thus financial freedom from a system of overreach and control in general.

Hey ho. Bitcoin still looks pretty stable in the face of US Senator Elizabeth Warren’s warpath right now, but let’s see what new attacks from her “Anti-Crypto Army” happen this week.

Meanwhile, however, Crypto Twittering analyst Rekt Capital is pleased that BTC has “broken the macro decline”, which is a trend line that has kept Bitcoin in bearish territory ever since it peaked in November 2022.

However, he cautions that a drop below USD 25k before pushing higher is not out of the question, looking at 2015’s price action as a historical example.

Fellow chart watcher Roman Trading, also sees the possibility of a short-term pullback, due to a DT (double top) formation for Bitcoin potentially playing out right now.

That said, as mentioned further above, Bitcoin is still holding its +$28k position at the time of writing.

Overdraft and downdraft: 11–100

With a market cap of around $7.9 billion to around $433 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour winners and losers at press time. (Statistics accurate at time of publication, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

PUMPS

• Kaspa (KAS), (market value: USD 694 million) +10%

• Aptos (APT), (mc: USD 2.17 billion) +7%

• EOS (EOS), (mc: USD 1.35 billion) +3%

• Decentralized country (MANA), (mc: USD 1.1 billion) +2%

• Quant (QNT), (mc: USD 1.86 billion) +2%

SLUMPS

• Arbitration (ARB), (market cap: USD 1.19 billion) -8%

• Conflux (CFX), (mc: USD 773 million) -8%

• Reproduce (RNDR), (mc: USD 460 million) -6%

• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: USD 964 million) -6%

• Mesh network (MASK), (mc: US$437 million) -5%