February

Brainstorming a novel new DeFi debt protocol

The initial idea was a synthetic stablecoin protocol that could be used to package collateral-specific stablecoins together to create risk tranches with differing yield profiles. Basically, CDOs on-chain.

August

First fundraise completed alongside protocol prototype with front-end.

By August, Kerman had a prototype ready to show investors and finished a $400k raise in less than two weeks.

September

Know your farmer, network launch, $1m TVL

ARCx was launched during the DeFi summer. To prevent yield farmers from farming and dumping the protocol, it implemented a system where only addresses engaged with specific smart contracts up to a certain block could participate. This system was termed "KYF" or "Know Your Farmer."

October

Developing protocol reputation

To cultivate an engaged and high-quality community, ARCx developed ERC20 tokens that could be earned by doing things in the protocol. Commonly known as “quests” today. The idea was to build “Runescape” style skill trees. One of the tokens was for helping users and exists on-chain here.

January

Launch of STABLEx

Enabling liquidity on a single stablecoin proved difficult, meaning aggregating all leveraged collateral in one token was the only viable path. To differentiate from other products, STABLEx used interest-bearing collateral to allow users to earn yield while borrowing. This proved to be successful with the help of farming initiatives, with STABLEx reaching $40m in TVL at the peak.

April

Token launch

ARCx launched its governance token in collaboration with 1Inch. The token had lots of fanfare at launch and gave us perspective on the benefits and challenges of launching a token (as we’d learn later).

June

Credit Scoring & DeFi Passport

We noticed that we had a group of ~500 KYF users who had backed us from the beginning and were aligned. If we could issue them credit scores and therefore allow them lower collateral ratios in the protocol, that’d be a novel new DeFi primitive.

July

Passport skins and collaborations

We introduced Shipped skins to generate awareness of passports and make them feel more real to people. This was a distraction looking back, but it was hard to discern given NFTs were at their peak hype. We learned through this to look past hypes and FADs as they create business and technical debt.

August

DeFi Passport Launch

Launched the first edition of the DeFi Passport, which only issues Passports based on users who meet the eligibility criteria. The idea of eligibility criteria was an unvalidated assumption that needed more rigor around it. 1000 passports were issued in the first hour. There was little utility for passports at this stage of time. ARCx tokens were required to mint the passport.

September

Passport integrations

Shipped Passport.js is a library that allows the DeFi Passport to surface on 3rd party websites, with Furocombo being the first integration. This didn’t add any real value to partners but would speak to us mainly because of the skins. They didn’t necessarily care about the real value proposition of on-chain identity here.

November

Scores and passports!

The ARCx Loyalty Score, the first “custom score,” was released to demonstrate the broader use case of the passport and our vision. The initial response was good, although there were questions on how we would iterate on these scores; users wanted to know what benefits it offered and how they would be sustained.

December

Hyper-accessible passports

Made Passports “free” and accessible by removing the requirement to mint an NFT on-chain and staking ARCx tokens. Users don’t want to mint NFTs unless it is painfully obvious why they should and a clear benefit is offered.

January

Pivoting to data

Collaborated with OlympusDAO to create an “Ohmie Score” which garnered a lot of attention to ARCx and further demonstrated interest in the idea of on-chain identity. While the score promised to have utility, an improvement on the first pass we made, what OlympusDAO really cared about was understanding their users through data. Many other protocols expressed similar sentiments.

April

Data-driven airdrops

With our scores still being released to generate awareness, Juicebox protocol reached out to us to help execute an airdrop with our data capabilities. We learned through this that through identity and data, airdrops could be far more effective. Through experience, we once again learned that helping projects understand who their users were was extremely helpful.

See the results here.

June

ARCx Consulting

To further validate the thesis that projects wanted to learn more about their users, we started doing consulting engagements to understand what specifically projects wanted to know. The output of these engagements was slide decks that would be manually created. While labour-intensive, it gave us a clear perspective on the challenges of producing deep, data-driven insights.

July

ARCx Credit

Released ARCx Credit and the DeFi Credit Score. This was our first end-to-end data product shipped that could ingest data on-chain, process it off-chain with novel algorithms, and upload it on-chain via a Merkle Root to be used in the lending smart contracts for variable Loan-To-Value ratios. To date, nothing has been as sophisticated as developed on-chain leveraging off-chain data.

September

First team retreat in Greece

In the 1.5 years of operating, we had never collected the whole team for a team-wide retreat. This proved to be a fun bonding moment but also raised some important questions, such as the direction of where we were heading with our distinct directions around Consulting and Credit. It gave us clues that would guide our future strategy, allowing us to better integrate our consulting services with our credit solutions and refine our approach to market demands and client needs.

October

Project Freebie

To scale our consulting revenue, we launched “Project Freebie.” A simple tool where projects would install a simple SDK into their front-end, and we’d produce automated insights as a result for free. The first version was a Google Data Studio dashboard that became the core product for a year!

November

Deprecating the past

We had to come to the painful realization that we were too early with on-chain credit scoring as traction was lacking. In addition, our token had catered 95% in value and was becoming a distraction to the team. The upshot was that Project Freebie was gaining traction. We decided to make three hard decisions: We paused ARCx Credit, transitioned our token privately — a first of its kind — and refocused squarely on analytics.

March

Downsizing the team & refactoring

Due to our significantly less product scope and change in direction, we had to downsize the team. This was painful but necessary to ensure survival through the bear market. In addition, we had incurred significant technical debt that required us to pay down. During this time, we kept iterating on the core dashboard product.

July

Fren Reviews

Due to our data capabilities, we could launch a new product category by reusing the infrastructure we already had. This was called Fren Reviews and served as a way to leave verified reviews on projects and provide context about their on-chain identity (something we already had from our analytics offering).

August

Analyze App

We started switching from the Data Studio dashboards we had been using to our own front end, which had taken over 6 months of development to make. This was a big milestone for the team as we could now develop specific features we couldn’t do in a dashboard. Data quality and complexity presented us with many challenges to bring this product to life, fortunately we eventually did.

April

0xArc

As a result of all our pivoting, we realized the identity of our brand had become diluted, and there were certain structural problems with the name “ARCx”; hence, we rebranded to “0xArc”. This change marked our start of defining permissionless identity and subsequently defining it in our brand identity.