Arbitrum's ARB token has lost roughly 24% of its value over the past 30 days, a decline approaching double ether's drop of about 13% over the same period. Bitcoin fell around 5% in that window.

Data from CoinGecko shows ARB touched $0.1638 on Oct. 24, its lowest level in four weeks. The token was changing hands near $0.167 late in the day, down about 5% over 24 hours, while ether lost roughly 2% and Bitcoin about 1% in the same stretch.

At 10:02 UTC on Oct. 23, ARB traded at $0.1802, below the $0.183 to $0.186 band that an Oct. 14 technical note had identified as a potential retest zone rather than a firm floor. That note had shown ARB at $0.1916. The band gave way, and the price continued to slide.

Peers fall harder in seven days

Other Ethereum scaling tokens also declined sharply. Optimism's OP dropped about 16% over 30 days, and Polygon's POL lost roughly 17%. Over the past week, OP fared worst, falling about 16% in seven days versus ARB's 9% and POL's 5%. Ether and Bitcoin slipped around 3% and 1.5%, respectively, over the same seven-day period.

The comparison spans a sector rather than a single project: Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon all operate networks that process transactions away from Ethereum's main chain to reduce costs, which is why their tokens are commonly tracked side by side.

Network usage moves the other way

Arbitrum One's on-chain activity moved in the opposite direction. Growthepie data indicates daily active addresses reached 563,669 on Oct. 23, up from 95,545 on Sept. 26. The metric dipped from 571,767 on Oct. 21 to 299,959 the following day before recovering. As the data provider notes, the number of addresses is not equivalent to the number of users.

On-chain activity is what generates the transaction fees that flow through these networks, so the gap between rising usage and a falling token price is one readers can track as fresh address data arrives.

September rally largely unwound

The slide has erased much of ARB's September rally. According to Cryptopolitan, the token had surged more than 167% in a month by Sept. 18, trading above $0.20 for the first time since January. At that point, ARB had gained more than 147% over 90 days and ranked among the top 10 tokens outperforming Bitcoin. Tokenized assets on Arbitrum hit a record of more than $800 million in assets under management at the time, while on-chain assets rose from $9.38 billion to $11.18 billion in a month.

Those record figures provided the fundamental backdrop to September's rally, and they now stand as a pre-pullback benchmark for the network's growth.

Standard Chartered's targets in focus

Standard Chartered set a $0.50 target for ARB by the end of 2026 and $10 by 2030 in mid-September. At roughly $0.167, ARB would need to nearly triple to reach the nearer mark.

"We see digital assets transitioning from a state where revenue is not yet relevant to one where revenue is critical," wrote Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at the bank.

The bank's own note acknowledged that ARB holders receive little of the network revenue underlying the call. ARB functions as the governance token of the Arbitrum DAO, giving holders voting power over protocol decisions rather than a direct on network fees. Chains built on Arbitrum technology under the Arbitrum Expansion Program pay 10% of net protocol revenue, with 8% flowing to the DAO treasury and 2% to a developer guild. The program's headline customer is Robinhood Chain, whose daily fees peaked at $6.04 million on Sept. 4 before falling to $448,616 by Sept. 14.

Whether Expansion Program fees rebuild from the September swing, and how much of that revenue reaches the DAO treasury, are concrete data points for tracking the revenue trend behind the bank's call.