Arbitrum Odyssey begins 🚀

Earning L2 NFTs … and maybe an airdrop?

William M. Peaster Jun 21, 2022 • 4 min read

Dear Bankless Nation,

Arbitrum is a layer two (L2) that’s designed to make Ethereum transactions very fast and very inexpensive.

And while Arbitrum may still have a ways to go before it’s fully evolved, the scaling solution already boasts ~$2B in total value locked (TVL) and has become an early leader of the L2 dapp scene.

In a bid to kick off the L2’s next phase of growth, Arbitrum’s creators launched The Arbitrum Odyssey today, June 21st. The 8-week program will see people performing on-chain quests as a way to tour some of the top dapps currently on Arbitrum.

Those who complete all the quests can collect up to 17 NFTs created by tubby cats artists Ratwell and Sugoi. So participating in the event allows us to simultaneously:

Support a promising scaling solution
Build up our personal L2 skill trees
Collect iconic NFTs
… and maybe qualify for an Arbitrum token airdrop??

On that last point, it’s pure speculation for now that The Odyssey campaign will somehow factor into a later Arbitrum airdrop. But if you’re interested in covering all the bases just in case, let’s walk through the campaign’s big ideas and its schedule so you can track along accordingly.

-WMP

L2 adventuring via The Arbitrum Odyssey

First up, Bridge Week

The Odyssey’s first week, which runs from June 21st through June 27th at 11:59PM EST, is Bridge Week. As its name suggests, this phase of the campaign will center on projects that are used for bridging funds to Arbitrum.

The 19 projects participating in the first leg of the program are as follows:

Qualifying for the first NFTs

If you use any of the projects listed above to move ETH to Arbitrum during Bridge Week, you’ll be able to collect The Odyssey’s first NFT reward after the week is over.

However, a second NFT reward will also be claimable by anyone who uses the bridge that ends up facilitating the most bridging activity during Bridge Week. For example, if Connext facilitates the most ETH-to-Arbitrum volume between June 21st and June 28th, Odyssey bridgers who used Connext during that period will be able to collect the campaign’s second NFT reward.

There’s no minimum ETH amount to qualify for either of these initial NFTs, so even just moving a very small amount of ETH to Arbitrum through the bridge you predict will facilitate the most activity may be enough to earn you both NFTs — if your prediction pans out after Bridge Week’s conclusion, of course!

For what it’s worth, Hop Exchange is in the lead right now according to this Dune Analytics dashboard by Spring Zhang, and I personally wouldn’t be surprised if that lead lasts for the rest of the week. We’ll just have to wait and see, though.

Double reward possibilities?

We’ve seen bridges like Hop and Synapse already launch native tokens, so we can look at other bridging protocols that don’t have tokens yet as potential candidates for later retroactive token airdrops.

Interestingly, a handful of projects that are participating in The Odyssey’s Bridge Week — for example Bungee, deBridge, and LI.FI — haven’t announced tokens yet. This tees up the possibility that trying these projects out during The Odyssey may help qualify you for their airdrops later, too, if they do end up opting to distribute tokens based on past activity.

Week 2 through Week 8

After Bridge week concludes on June 28th, we’ll see The Odyssey shift to focusing on two tasks from two projects per week.

Hashflow was originally slated to be featured in Week 2, but the project’s team later decided to participate in Bridge Week. This move paved the way for decentralized perpetuals exchange GMX to join the campaign, so The Odyssey’s updated schedule is as follows:

Week 1: Bridge Week (June 21st->June 28th)
Week 2: Yield Protocol and GMX (June 28th->July 5th)
Week 3: Aboard Exchange and TofuNFT (July 5th->July 12th)
Week 4: Uniswap and Apex (July 12th->July 19th)
Week 5: 1inch and Izumi/Yin Finance (July 19th->July 26th)
Week 6: Dodo and Swapr (July 26th->August 2nd)
Week 7: TreasureDAO and Battlefly (August 2nd->August 9th)
Week 8: Ideamarket and Sushi (August 9th->August 16th)

We don’t know what the tasks will be for these upcoming weeks yet, as the Arbitrum team is going to release that info on an ongoing basis. To stay on top of The Odyssey as it progresses, consider turning on post notifications for the Arbitrum Twitter account or follow along in the Arbitrum Discord.

Zooming out

The Odyssey is set to usher in a new wave of users to Arbitrum and grow the L2’s community that much further.

The L2 itself is still in beta, meaning the tech’s training wheels still haven’t come off yet, so to speak. However, the arrival of The Odyssey shows that Arbitrum’s builders are confident in their scaling solution’s current abilities and are ready to progress the L2 to its next chapter.

For now, we can only speculate on what that next chapter will look like exactly. If it does involve the launch of a native token, participating in The Odyssey and its quests seems like a no-brainer way to get in line for that while also supporting a promising L2 and collecting cool NFTs.

Action steps

🌉 Consider bridging some ETH to Arbitrum for Bridge Week
📌 Follow Arbitrum announcements

William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he writes the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art on Ethereum in his free time. He lives in Washington.