David Angliss, an analyst with Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm, Apollo Crypto, shares the fund’s regular take on what’s happening in the fast-changing and volatile cryptocurrency space.

The highly anticipated $ARB airdrop can now finally be claimed. It’s the token for Arbitrum – one of the leading layer 2 scaling solutions for Ethereum – and has been creating buzz in the crypto community for months.

If you managed to catch previous airdrop articles in Coinhead, hopefully you delved in and undertook each Arbitrum ecosystem step you needed to take in order to qualify. Congrats, if so. And, by the way, you can check your ARB airdrop status at the official Arbitrum Foundation site here.

It wasn’t an overly straightforward process for the casual crypto investor, however, so there’s every chance you may have missed out on a fairly lucrative payday if you didn’t take the time to follow procedures, part of which involved bridging assets over from the Ethereum chain to the Arbitrum network.

If so, you might want to keep in mind that there are some other, equally promising if not better, L2 airdrop opportunities still to come.

For the purposes of this article then, we asked David Angliss a little bit about those opportunities, as well as his expectations for the ARB token and where there might still be a good entry point for those who missed the drop.

 

How much will the ARB token be worth?

That’s the question on many an airdrop hunter’s mind right now, considering many will be receiving around 3,000 tokens or more.

“The amount of ARB that’s being unlocked for this airdrop is almost 12% of the total supply of the project’s tokens, and the maximum supply is 10 billion,” noted Angliss.

“A moderate, fully diluted valuation of Arbitrum would be around the US$6.5 billion mark, while an optimistic fully diluted valuation would be around US$12 billion,” he added (see image below).

“Now what’s interesting is that prePO [a disruptive pre-public investing platform] have got their live market up and running, and it’s giving Arbitrum a fully diluted valuation of US$16 billion right now, which, would value the ARB token somewhere between the $1.25 to $2 bracket.”

Images: supplied by Apollo Crypto

 

Trading ARB, in fact any token, is about timing

Angliss emphasised that anyone looking to sell their airdropped tokens, or indeed anyone who missed out on the drop and looking to buy, needs to be very careful with their timing.

“You have to be very cautious with trading these tokens within the first week,” said the analyst. “Especially within the first 24 hours, because there’s going to be a lot of volatility.

“There will be a lot of people just cashing in all or most of their tokens. If ARB does get to above that $2 mark, I would be cautious buying at that point, as that’s at the ‘ecstatic’ price level.

“As for Apollo, we would probably only look to add to a position in ARB when it’s closer to or less than $1.”

 

Layer 2 season?

So, is Apollo is bullish on Arbitrum and/or its main optimistic rollup-based Ethereum scaling rival Optimism?

“Bullish on both,” said Angliss. “But I think it’s more a question of are both those layer 2 protocols going to be taking market share away from competing layer 1 chains such as Avalanche and Fantom and all the others.

“And I think the answer is very much yes. The L2s open up a broader user base for Ethereum utilising its extra security and decentralisation.

“L2 season is definitely coming into fruition. As long as Bitcoin and Ethereum keep performing well in the market, as they have done so far this year, then these sorts of altcoins should do well, too.”

 

What effect will the ARB airdrop have on the crypto market?

Angliss notes that it could be very positive.

“With 1.2 billion airdropped ARB tokens hitting wallets, what you’ll have, if the ARB price settles, say, around US$1.2 dollars is about US$1.44 billion being injected into the crypto ecosystem.

“So you you’re essentially stimulating the DeFi ecosystem, too. Some people are going to hold it, some people are going to sell it. Some people are going to go into stablecoins, and some people are going to buy Ethereum with it, or maybe other Arbitrum ecosystem tokens.

“So all in all, it’s like a second mini stimulus. Well, actually, quite a large one with the average ARB drop being around the 3,000 to 4,000 mark. Airdrop recipients have essentially got themselves a big stimmy cheque here.”

 

Other airdrop opps

If you’re feeling bummed out or annoyed with yourself for missing out on the ARB drop, now’s the time to make sure you grab the next big opportunity. Because not only is it shaping as “L2 season” in crypto, it’s also clearly airdrop season, with some huge decentralised protocols yet to release tokens.

Of these, Angliss nominates the following as top priorities for those willing to jump in and become early adopters:

•  zkSync

 

• Starknet

 

• Scroll ZKP

 

• LayerZero

Does Angliss have a favourite among these opportunities?

“Yep, zkSync, hands down. I rate its zk-rollup tech highly. I believe zero-knowledge proof technology can process transactions a lot quicker than Optimistic rollup technology. Zk is very complicated technology, however, which is why it’s taking a longer time to develop and for zk protocols to get to market.”

None of the contents of this article should be construed as financial advice. 

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