Ethereum layer 2 network Arbitrum took a step forward in boosting its gaming ecosystem by voting to allocate 200 million ARB tokens — about $342 million at today’s prices — to “catalyze” gaming on its network in a snapshot vote that ended on Friday. At press time, the treasury for Arbitrum holds more than 3.4 billion ARB tokens worth over $5.97 billion, blockchain data from Etherscan shows.
On Friday, Arbitrum governance members voted almost unanimously (96.76%) to accelerate game development on the layer 2 blockchain network through “The Gaming Catalyst Program” which proposed allocating 200 million ARB from Arbitrum’s treasury for the project, according to the proposal’s voting snapshot page.
The conclusion of the snapshot vote – Arbitrum’s mechanism to gauge sentiment offchain – marks the passage “to the second and final step: an on-chain vote facilitated by [crypto governance platform] Tally, per Arbitrum’s documents. A wallet holding at least 1 million ARB tokens, currently worth about $1.74 million, will submit an onchain proposal to Tally for a final vote at a future date.
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The 200 million ARB allocation is “an aggressive budget to attract builders and retain talent,” according to the proposal’s forum discussion. While Arbitrum has the highest locked value in its smart contracts at $16.88 billion, it has yet to develop a notable gaming presence.
“The branding of Arbitrum as a home for gamers and game builders is nascent,” wrote Dan Peng, co-founder of Vela Exchange and author of the proposal in Arbitrum’s forum discussion. “As a network, Arbitrum fails behind several major competitors across total games migrated, games launched, and total gamers,” he added.
According to the proposal, 80% of the earmarked funding would be dedicated to builder onboarding over two years; meanwhile the remaining 20% would be geared toward infrastructure bounties for any tooling needed to support gaming within the Arbitrum ecosystem, such as account abstraction solutions, game engine software developer kits, and data analytics.
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The snapshot vote’s conclusion comes a little over a week after $2 billion worth of ARB was unlocked to team members, advisors, and investors of Offchain Labs, the software firm tasked with developing Arbitrum. This unlock was the largest in Arbitrum’s history.
ARB, the native governance token for the Arbitrum ecosystem, has increased 4.4% in the past 24 hours to $1.72, per CoinGecko. Arbitrum representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
