Arbitrum has just announced the launch and airdrop of ARB, its native governance token. The coin has yet to be released, however the developer team has said that ARB will be available in qualifying wallets on March 23.

That's given the Crypto Twitterati plenty of time to speculate on how much the new tokens would be worth.

Several experts believe that Optimism's OP token is a decent starting point for assessing ARB token prices. Layer-2 networks have a same technological stack that employs optimistic rollups. The Optimist team announced the launch of their coin in April 2022.

Price of $ARB

According to CoinGecko, the market capitalization of Optimism is around $839 million, with each token valued at $2.63. The circulating supply of OP is 314.8 million.

ARB's circulation supply will be roughly 1.275 billion after the airdrop on Thursday. There are 10 billion tokens in total supply, with 12.75% reaching the market this week.

The circulating supply of a token refers to how many tokens are currently trading on the market. It is distinct from the entire supply of a token, which is the total amount of tokens in existence, including frozen allocations. Its market cap is derived by multiplying the price of a token by its circulating quantity.

If the ARB token is valued at the same level as OP, the price of ARB would be $0.65 after dividing OP's current market cap ($839 million) by the number of ARB tokens released (1.275 billion).

After estimations based on the circulating quantity of tokens, experts are now focusing on the project's fully diluted worth (FDV).

With a total quantity of 4.29 billion tokens, the FDV, or projected market valuation based on total token supply, of OP tokens is $11.45 billion.

A token's FDV is derived by multiplying its market price by its entire supply. The FDV is a more forward-looking assumption than the circulation market capitalization since it includes tokens that will be freed at a later date.

If the ARB token trades at a similar FDV to Optimism rather than the circulating market cap, its price will be roughly $1.15. This amount is calculated by dividing the FDV of OP ($11.45 billion) by the total quantity of ARB tokens (10 billion).

What comes next for ARB?

Based to the estimates above, the token might trade between $0.64 and $2.07.The bulk of early Arbitrum users received 625 ARB tokens, equating to a total airdrop value of between $400 and $1,250.

The maximum allocation per address is 10,250 ARB tokens, with around 4,400 wallets receiving between $6,500 and $20,600 in tokens.