ArenaDAO’s Governance Token Surges Almost 50% Amid Vote to Authorize Paradigm Purchase

ARENA, ArenaDAO’s governance token, jumped 11.12% in the past hour and 48.99% in the past 24 hours following the opening of ArenaDAO’s vote to authorize crypto native investment firm Paradigm purchase 150 million tokens or 15% of the total supply for $6 million USDC.

By increasing to 7.9 cents Thursday, the token’s fully diluted valuation or market capitalization of all tokens once released into circulation sits at $79.8 million at presstime, per Dex Screener, but at Paradigm’s purchase price of ARENA, the token has a fully diluted valuation of $40 million. The token’s 24-hour volume currently stands at roughly $61,000, per GeckoTerminal.

Earlier Thursday, the on-chain voting period for ArenaDAO opened. Since then, a total of 9 addresses voted, providing unanimous support in favor of authorizing the DAO to sell its tokens to Paradigm. Data from blockchain analytics firm Nansen shows 142 unique addresses holding ARENA, a 10% increase since Monday.

If passed, the $6 million sale to Paradigm will be authorized and the funds will be used as working capital for the DAO to grow Code4rena, according to the on-chain vote. The vote ends one week from now, March 23.

The author of the governance proposal said, “We’re excited to have [Paradigm’s] expertise in helping Code4rena achieve our shared mission of making the web3 ecosystem more secure, whilst rewarding all contributors.” In 2022, $3.8 billion was stolen from DeFi protocols in hacks, per Chainalysis.

In the past 15 hours, a Code4rena token lock up contract, labeled by Nansen, sent 55 million tokens to five addresses. Two of these five addresses participated in the ongoing vote.

Code4rena is an audit platform that organizes security contests for smart contracts and offers “guaranteed payouts” for audit contests, as stated in its technical docs. The security contest organizer for smart contracts had 46 users earn more than $40,000 for their efforts in uncovering vulnerabilities last year, data from Code4rena’s leaderboard shows.

The governance vote highlights Paradigm’s hands-on approach in blockchain safety: In addition to its involvement with Code4rena, Paradigm also organizes its own Web3 focused security competition called Paradigm CTF.

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