☢ Watch Before Buying Arbitrum! - ARB Crypto Analysis

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]73 million dollars. That's how much the Arbitrum Security Foundation has frozen after the hack of the Arbitrum protocol by a Kelp DAO. Now, what kind of impact does this have on the Arbitrum price?

[00:00:15]Let's have a look at some on-chain data most people are not considering. Let's try to figure out where we're going from here. Now, the last year has not been great for most altcoins. Most altcoins went down and Arbitrum is no exception.

[00:00:27]But maybe that's an opportunity. Have a look at this. This is the up price relative to Bitcoin. It's a long-term chart. It starts in 2023.

[00:00:37]And since the beginning of that chart, Arbitrum underperformed by 97%.

[00:00:44]But again, this can be an opportunity because we can flip this chart. This is Bitcoin relative to Arbitrum. So, we can bet on the falling Arbitrum price and at the same time on the rising Bitcoin price. Thus, canceling out the general ups and downs of the crypto market, just playing the delta how Arbitrum tends to long-term underperform. Hi, my name is Gerhard. I've been in crypto for the last 8 years. I hit my first million 3 years ago. And in this video, I want to share what kind of data points I look at in order to long-term outperform just buying and holding Bitcoin. On average, I outperform by roughly 2% per month.

[00:01:21]This is the monthly performance. Every now and then, I lose, but on average, I win. The dotted line here, that's the 12-month average. This is then how that looks like over time. We also started a copy trading pool last year. So, that's for the premium members. Here is the average premium member gain. And we also have a copy trading pool this year.

[00:01:39]Again, on track to make roughly 40% per annum. And we're not doing this by trying to find the one or two altcoins that outperform. We are doing the exact opposite. We find altcoins that long-term underperform. And then, we're just flipping things around. Now, Arbitrum is sold as powering the programmable economy. And it is apparently the future of Ethereum. It's a layer two on top of Ethereum. It can transact a bit faster. But really, social media is all about the price development. Will it ever recover? And what does the freezing of the funds of those 30,000 Ethereum tokens have to do with all of this? Now, here's Arbitrum in US dollars. Of course, it's going down over the long term. But we do have our rallies every now and then, 150% over there. Here is 140%.

[00:02:28]But those rallies are mainly caused by the general market going up. When we look at Arbitrum relative to the others market cap, so how is Arbitrum doing within the altcoin market, the underperformance is much more constant.

[00:02:42]So, really, if you look at relative performance, it's very risky to hold Arbitrum long-term. And the reason for that is token inflation. Have a look at the following chart here. This is how many up tokens are floating over time.

[00:02:57]Arbitrum is an inflationary token. Early investors and the team, etc., they cash out up tokens over time. And that's the constant selling pressure. And that's not met by adequate demand at the same time. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if Arbitrum was growing very quickly. But that's not the case. Here is the TVL, the total value locked on the Arbitrum chain. It peaked at more than 4 billion dollars in October of last year. And now, it's down to 1.6 billion dollars. Here's the decentralized exchange trading volume.

[00:03:30]Also, not necessarily growing, rather the opposite. And so, the tokenomics of Arbitrum aren't that great. The supply is growing very quickly. The project itself is not. Does it make sense to potentially buy the up token because it's very cheap? What about the market cap? Now, we are currently at 12 cents per up token. And the market cap is at 700 million. Comparing that to other layer two scaling solutions, Arbitrum is still not that cheap. Matic is at 1 billion. Mental is at 2 billion. But Optimism, for example, went all the way down to 260 million already. As with many altcoins right now, most trading volume does not happen on the spot market anymore. We've got 15 million over here at weeks. But on the perpetual futures market, we've got almost 40 million on Binance. Now, despite the long-term underperformance, the funding rate of Arbitrum is actually positive.

[00:04:24]In other words, it costs money to bet on rising prices. We do get money in terms of funding fees when we bet on falling prices. Betting on the falling Arbitrum price is not the popular trade yet. And that's surprising given the long-term underperformance. But that's what the data is showing. Now, have a look at the trading volume. That's rather low. And that's potentially a risk because there is positive correlation between the up price and trading volume. When there is more attention on the asset, and the asset tends to go up in price. When then that attention fades away, it goes to the next cryptocurrency, the price goes down. When we are currently very low on the trading volume, that's not good, especially from the lens of betting on a falling price and playing this delta here, right? Long Bitcoin, short Arbitrum. But then, we see the open interest. That's not necessarily that much lower compared to the historical trend. And we do see how constantly the longs get liquidated. So, there seems to be a balanced market. There seems to not yet be the popular trade. I don't think that the market makers are going to short manipulate the Arbitrum price up in order to liquidate the shorts. The shorts seem to not be in the majority.

[00:05:36]And so, Arbitrum is a very good candidate for our copy trading. I am, by the way, announcing all of my trades here in Telegram as well. This was the last one, a bit tenser. We closed it just before the recent short squeeze. We did that based on a backtest of the best moving averages. But that's a topic for another video. For now, if you want to learn more about the approaches that we follow here, there are plenty of tutorials available here in premium. And there's, of course, also the copy trading where we target again our 44% this year. So, I don't think it makes sense to buy into Arbitrum simply because of the tokenomics. There's just too much constant selling pressure. If you want crypto exposure in general, just stick with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. And for the individual altcoins, again, the vast majority tends to underperform most of the time. And really, do you want to make the bet to find the winner in a sea [clears throat] of losers? I don't think that's the right approach. And the numbers confirm that it's not the right approach. I'm mainly betting on falling alts. And I'm doing this across the cycles, and it's a winning strategy across cycles, both in bull markets and in bear markets. If it's your first time here, feel free to subscribe. I publish here regularly. A like would be very much appreciated as well. It helps the channel grow. See you next time here on YouTube or see you in premium as well. Cheers.