Arbitrum

2018-01-01

Ed Felten, Steven Goldfeder, and Harry Kalodner publish the original Arbitrum research paper at Princeton and found Offchain Labs.

2019-04-03

Offchain Labs raises $3.7M seed round led by Pantera Capital.

2021-08-31

Offchain Labs launches Arbitrum One mainnet to the public and announces a $120M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, valuing the company at $1.2 billion.

2023-03-23

ARB token launches with a public airdrop; 42 million ARB claimed in the first hour. Total supply set at 10 billion tokens.

2023-03-31

AIP-1 published as an omnibus proposal including transfer of 750 million ARB to Foundation. The Foundation had already sold 10M ARB and loaned 40M ARB to Wintermute prior to the vote concluding.

2023-04-02

AIP-1 receives over 76% opposition votes; Arbitrum Foundation concedes, pledging to break the omnibus into individual votes and suspend near-term token sales.

2023-06-01

Arbitrum DAO approves the Gaming Catalyst Program, allocating 225 million ARB (approximately $215M at the time) over three years to accelerate web3 gaming on Arbitrum.

2023-12-15

Arbitrum One sequencer experiences approximately 78-minute outage triggered by a surge of Ordinals-style inscriptions overwhelming the batch poster system.

2024-01-12

ARB token reaches its all-time high price of $2.40.

2024-08-21

Prometheum Capital adds ARB to its custodial platform, treating it as a 'digital asset security' — the first regulated U.S. entity to formally classify it as such.

2024-09-03

High-severity denial-of-service vulnerability disclosed in Arbitrum Stylus; a logic flaw could crash the Nitro sequencer at no cost. Rated High severity; $80,000 bounty awarded.

2024-10-16

Radiant Capital loses $50M to an exploit on Arbitrum and BNB Chain; attackers compromised developer devices to push fraudulent multisig transactions. Later attributed to North Korea's UNC4736 group.

2024-12-01

Arbitrum DAO member proposes recall of approximately 220 million ARB from the Gaming Catalyst Program multisig following missed deadlines and inadequate reporting.

2025-02-01

Offchain Labs launches BoLD (Bounded Liquidity Delay) permissionless dispute resolution protocol on Arbitrum One and Nova mainnet, enabling any party to become a validator and elevating Arbitrum to L2BEAT Stage 1.

2025-04-09

Vote-buying incident surfaces: hitmonlee.eth spends 5 ETH (~$10,000) on Lobby Finance to acquire 19.3M ARB of voting power, electing CupOJoseph to the Oversight and Transparency Committee; the seat carries 66 ETH annual compensation plus a 100,000 ARB bonus.

2026-04-18

KelpDAO suffers a $292M exploit linked to the Lazarus Group. Approximately 116,500 rsETH is drained from its LayerZero cross-chain bridge; 30,766 ETH (approximately $71M) is later traced to an Arbitrum address.

2026-04-21

Arbitrum Security Council invokes its 9-of-12 emergency multisig to freeze 30,766 ETH linked to the KelpDAO exploit, sparking wide debate over centralization and the limits of 'decentralized' governance.

2026-05-01

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issues a restraining order blocking the Arbitrum DAO from transferring the frozen ETH, after terrorism-judgment creditors assert claims against the Lazarus Group-linked funds.

2026-05-08

Arbitrum DAO votes to approve the $71M ETH release despite the ongoing U.S. seizure fight. A Manhattan federal judge modifies the restraining order to allow transfer to an Aave LLC wallet, which agreed to be bound by the notice.