Ethereum layer2 solution Arbitrum would airdrop 112.8 million ARB tokens to 137 decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) on its ecosystem on March 23.

Arbitrum says airdrop is not a retroactive grant

In a March 21 Twitter thread, Arbitrum said the airdrop was not a retroactive grant. Instead, it was a way of empowering the sub-communities on the layer2 network to localize governance decisions.

Arbitrum added that the airdrops would be distributed only to projects with a DAO and a community treasury. However, it made an exception for The Protocol Guild, a collective of Ethereum core developers and contributors.

Arbitrum said it considered factors like the project’s deployment date alongside whether it was multi-chain or native to its ecosystem. Other factors considered include the transaction volume, the total value of assets locked on the project, and native liquidity moved to the ecosystem.

It added:

“The hope and intention is that by distributing to Arbitrum DAOs, we’re able to spread governance power more widely amongst users than solely allocating to those who were eligible for the airdrop.”

GMX to get 8 million tokens

A breakdown of the airdrop distribution by Nansen showed that the decentralized exchange GMX and TREASURE would get the highest amount of tokens — 8 million each.

Other projects like Uniswap (UNI) and SushiSwap (SUSHI) would get 4.3 million and 4.2 million ARB tokens, respectively.

MakerDAO, KyberSwap, DODO, Camelot, and 24 other projects would be over 1 million ARB tokens. ParaSwap, Chainlink (LINK), and 43 other projects would get over 200,000 tokens.

Meanwhile, the least amount of tokens — 75,000 — would be distributed to 60 decentralized finance (DeFi) projects.