Arbitrum Community is About to Implement ARB Staking

The Arbitrum community is voting to launch staking in order to unlock utility for the ARB token and increase its onchain usage.

Upon approval, Arbitrum would implement staking via the Tally governance system, and introduce a liquid staking token, stARB. The Arbitrum DAO would retain the power to turn on fee distribution, and send the fees to ARB stakers, however the current proposal does not include turning on the “fee switch”.

The proposal is open from Aug. 8 to Aug. 15, and currently has a 98.8% “For” vote, which would see the proposed changes pass.

Tally-Driven Proposal

Written by Tally’s Chief Revenue Officer 0xFrisson, the blog post highlighted issues with the current token structure, mentioning that the ARB token is struggling to accrue value, less than 1% of ARB tokens are being used onchain, and only 10% is contributing to governance.

Tally is a plug-in front end for DAO governance. The service allows DAO operators to build home pages and proposals, and for voters and delegates to create personal profiles, and use their governance rights. The company works with some of DeFi’s largest DAO’s including Uniswap, and Aave.

ARB’s Poor Performance

Arbitrum’s ARB has mostly been on a steady downtrend since its launch.

The token opened at roughly $1.3 in March 2023, and despite a surge to as high as $2.2 in January 2024, it now sits over 50% below its launch price. In the same amount of time Bitcoin has increased by 150%.

While the price action has been painful for investors, it is not necessarily indicative of poor fundamentals. Arbitrum is the largest Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) by total value locked with $2.7 billion in TVL.

Since the proposal went live on Aug 8, Arbitrum’s price has rallied over 20% from $0.48 to $0.58.