Between Arbitrum’s [ARB] surging demand and whirlwind drop-off

• Korean exchange Upbit could be the second-largest ARB holder per accumulation speculation
• ARB’s value has decreased by 6% in the last seven days

A part of Arbitrum’s [ARB] 2023 roadmap was the objective for its token to become available to the public. In grand style, it was done on 16 March as users of the network were AirDropped free tokens. Amid the extravaganza, ARB fell to selling pressure as beneficiaries of the distribution could not wait to gather the harvest of active participation. 

How much are 1,10,100 ARBs worth today?

ARB: Gold in the eyes of “these entities?”

While many of the retail class engaged in selling, some deep pockets thought it a good time to hold and accumulate more. OxScope revealed the details of one such case. According to the web3 knowledge graph protocol, an Externally Owned Account (EOA) had been stockpiling ARB since 30 March.

An EOA is a contract account controlled by a private key. As indicated above, the wallet held 59 million ARB at press time, making it the second-largest holder of the token behind Binance [BNB]. 0xScope also mentioned that there were chances that the address could belong to Upbit, Korea’s largest digital asset exchange. 

An action like this suggests that the address may have settled for a buying opportunity at the ARB’s press time price. In disparity, there was also a case where a massive sell-off matched up to the large accumulation.

Lookonchain, the famous Twitter smart money detector, disclosed that one of the largest recipients of the ARB token had sold every part of the token held. Interestingly, this address has been involved in providing liquidity on Uniswap [UNI] as of 24 March.

But as things stand, Uniswap’s benefits from the scaling solution could rest in uncertainty. Following the development, ARB lost 2.49% of its 24-hour volume, bringing the seven-day performance to a 6.11% decrease.

Bears sneaking but the bull company isn’t gone

Technical chart-wise, ARB was exhibiting a high amount of volatility based on the Bollinger Bands (BB). Hence, price swings in either direction could play out in the short term. Meanwhile, the Awesome Oscillator (AO) showed that the risk of falling to a bearish momentum was higher than the possibility of a bullish breakout. As of this writing, the AO was -0.0075.

In addition, nothing exactly positive came out of the Directional Movement Index (DMI) trend. Indeed, the +DMI (green) and -DMI (red) at 19.76 and 21.84 individually had no strong support from the Average Directional Index (ADX). 

Source: TradingView

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With the ADX (yellow) less than 25, it means that many traders were avoiding jumping on the ARB price trend. However, price patterns could be easy to recognize here, denoting a sign of possible accumulation and distribution.

Finally, it may be a call too quick to write off ARB as underperforming since it’s less than one month old. Take, for instance, Aptos [APT] which launched in a similar style in 2022, and experienced a decline in growth. Later, it went haywire with a tremendous uptick. Hence, there is a chance that ARB could recover, especially since it capitulated from an $11 launch price.