Arbitrum · nothing is minted, and it still floods the market.

Arbitrum has never created a single new ARB. All 10B were made at once in March 2023, and the chain's own counter today sits marginally below that starting number — it has only ever gone down. The wording matters here: the power to create more still exists. Token holders can vote to add up to 2% a year, no more than once a year, and that vote has never been called in the token's whole life. So this is a zero we re-check every rebuild, not a zero settled forever.

The metronome of this coin. Team, contributors and investors were given 4.45B ARB locked for four years from March 2023, released in equal monthly pieces of 92.65M on the 16th of every month, and the final piece lands Mar 16 2027. Three of them fell inside this window — Jun 16, Jul 16 and Aug 16 2026. Worth knowing how we checked it: we swept every block of Aug 16 2026 and found no single 92.65M transfer, because these tranches free up across hundreds of separate wallets rather than opening one vault. What proves the calendar is real is the arithmetic — the stock still locked comes to 641.1M, and seven monthly pieces remain, worth 648.5M. Those agree to about 1%.

This is the row the coin actually turns on, and it only appears if you ask the right question. The DAO treasury holds 2.56B ARB and it is not part of the tradable market — subtract it and the Foundation's own locked 124.7M from everything not yet circulating, and what is left matches the unfinished vesting almost exactly. So when the treasury pays out, that is genuinely new supply arriving. It paid 230M to the Foundation's operating wallet on Jun 28 2026, took back 86.2M on Jul 7 and 43.0M on Jul 21 2026, for a real move of 100.7M. On top of it the Foundation's own locked allocation released 43.9M into the same wallet on May 29, Jun 30 and Jul 31 2026. The 10M a month that wallet then sends onward to an exchange is where it ends up — not a separate figure, or the same coins would be counted twice.

There is no bankruptcy estate, trustee schedule or court-ordered distribution anywhere in the ARB picture. Arbitrum launched in 2023 as a going concern and has never been through an insolvency, so no such pool is feeding coins to the market.

Nothing buys ARB back. Arbitrum earns real money — transaction fees, priority auctions, and a share of revenue from the chains built on its technology — but every cent of it arrives as ETH or dollars and stays that way in the treasury. On Jul 9 2026 the team announced that Orbit chains route a tenth of their revenue back to the ecosystem, which grows the treasury but buys no ARB. Turning any of that into token purchases would take its own vote. One was floated and never carried.

There is nothing to burn. Arbitrum charges gas in ETH, not in ARB, so there is no stream of ARB flowing into the protocol that could be destroyed. The chain's supply counter did not fall by a single unit across the whole window, which is what a burn of any size would have shown.

No public evidence of release in window — monitored. No Arbitrum entity has disclosed buying ARB on the open market, and every identified team address was a net sender this quarter: the treasury paid out more than it took in, and the operating wallet moved 30M onward to an exchange.

Staking exists on paper and locks nothing in practice. The receipt you get for staking is itself tradable, so the coins never leave the market, and the rewards are paid out of chain revenue in ETH rather than in new ARB. We read the staking contract directly: it held zero ARB at the start of the window and zero at the end, and its receipt token has fewer than 200 units in existence.