Decentral Block Post

Arbitrum (ARB) has emerged as a leading contender within the Ethereum network's layer-2 scalability solutions, boasting a significant total value locked (TVL) and notable activity. However, between Sept. 9 and Sept. 11, the price of ARB tokens experienced a sharp decline of 14.5%, marking its lowest point in history.

Investors are now eagerly seeking insight into the factors driving this movement and questioning whether Arbitrum still possesses the competitive edge, especially considering that irrespective of ARB token performance, the network TVL exceeds $1.6 billion.

It is worth noting that the past week has been challenging for most cryptocurrencies but among Ethereum's scaling solutions, none experienced a drop exceeding 9%, except for Arbitrum.

ARB governance proposals bring questionable benefits

One potential source of concern stems from the absence of any instances of fraud proof issuance since the launch of the Arbitrum mainnet in August 2021. Offchain Labs confirmed this information to Cointelegraph on Sept. 4. Developers, however, have explained that this situation aligns with the intended operation of the system, as validators with malicious intentions risk losing their entire stake. Consequently, this data is unlikely to have significantly impacted the price in the past week.

Additional factors that may help elucidate the recent price downturn are associated with governance proposals. The first proposal, posted on Sept. 2, aims to allocate up to 75 million ARB tokens from the project's treasury to address "short-term community needs" for active decentralized applications (dApps) within the ecosystem. However, even if approved, this allocation represents less than 2% of the DAO treasury holdings and is unlikely to have triggered the ARB token price correction, regardless of one's stance on the proposal.

Cryptocurrency asset outflows for the week of Sept. 3 through 9 totaled $59.3 million, bringing the current run to $249 million over four consecutive weeks. 

Bitcoin (BTC) experienced the bulk of activity last week, with its $68.9 million in outflows offset by Short Bitcoin inflows in the amount of $15.2 million and $0.7 million from XRP (XRP).

According to CoinShares, regulatory and financial market insecurity are to blame for the streak:

“We believe continued worries over regulation of the asset class and recent dollar strength are the most likely reasons for this. Trading volumes also dropped significantly, by 73% in comparison to the prior week to just US$754 million for the week.”

Last week also brought an end to Solana’s (SOL) recent run. After nine weeks of inflows totaling $14.1 million prompted CoinShares to suggest that it was “the most loved altcoin amongst investors,” Solana saw $1.1 million in outflows.