As countdown for ARB begins, Arbitrum outshines BNB Chain on this front

• With a weekly growth of 32.41%, Arbitrum surpassed BNB Chain in DEX volume.
• The total value locked (TVL) jumped more than 21% over the last week.

Arbitrum’s [ARB] decentralized exchange (DEX) volume went past $4 billion over the last seven days, logging its best weekly performance ever. In fact, this was the second consecutive weekly all-time high recorded by the layer-2 rollup.

With a growth of 32.41%, it surpassed BNB Chain [BNB] to become the public chain second only to Ethereum [ETH] in DEX trading volume, data from DeFiLlama revealed.

Source: DeFiLlama

Uniswap [UNI] accounted for over 50% of the total volume on the chain. Additional data from Coingecko showed that the most traded pair on Uniswap (Arbitrum) was USDC/WETH, indicating that stablecoins were still transacted heavily on exchanges.

Arbitrum’s TVL grows

Apart from the DEX trading, Arbitrum chain registered a significant increase in the total funds deposited on its smart contracts. The total value locked (TVL) jumped over 21% over the last week, the highest

Arbitrum’s dominant DeFi protocol was GMX, a decentralized derivatives exchange, which accounted for nearly 40% of the total TVL.

Source: DeFiLlama

Additionally, the chain saw a marked increase in the number of users. Data from Token Terminal pointed towards a 44% increase in the weekly average of daily active users. High traffic on the network pushed the total transaction fees in the last week to $931k, representing a jump of 11%.

Source: Token Terminal

Hype around ARB

Last week, the Arbitrum ecosystem announced the launch of its native token, ARB, speculations of which were rife in the crypto space. The upcoming AirDrop, slated for 23 March, will distribute about 1.27 billion tokens to Arbitrum community members.

The launch of the governance token will enable holders to vote and propose changes regarding Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks, marking Arbitrum’s transition to a full-fledged decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Meanwhile, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, announced that it will list ARB and spot trading pairs will begin on 23 March. The withdrawals will commence on 24 March, the exchange said.