Arcadia April Recap

Welcome to Arcadia’s first monthly recap. A lot has happened since our launch at the end of March 2023. In this recap, we’ll be going over the key milestones for Arcadia over the past month. We’ll also share a glimpse of what the team is currently working on, and some insights into the road ahead! We couldn’t be more excited about the vision of a permisionless and composable margin account primitive.

TL;DR

In April, Arcadia achieved several key milestones, including the launch of our USDC and ETH lending pools on both Ethereum and Optimism, and the integration of new collateral assets including cbETH, wstETH, rETH, DAI, FXR, FXS, OP, CRV, and wBTC. As of April 28th, Arcadia had $1.2M in TVL, $2M in total deposits, and more than 1,300 margin accounts opened. In the coming months, the team will focus on improving the user experience and expanding partnerships and integrations.

Metrics

Liquidity metrics — Arcadia grew from $0 to $2mm in total deposits, over $320,000 in borrows, and peaked at 1.5mm in tvl in less than a month, with no token incentives and with supply caps in place that have prevented liquidity from growing beyond those numbers.

User metrics — Arcadia’s liquidity and capital efficiency helped drive early demand. The total number of margin accounts opened grew from 0 to 1,335 in less than a month. The number of liquidity providers in the protocol also saw noteworthy growth, currently sitting at 628 LPs as of this writing. The limited number of collateral assets, features, and integrations available during our launch — as our focus was to stress-test the protocol — have limited growth in user demand, we hope to expand these further after completing another (ongoing) audit.

Milestones

March 2023 — Mainnet & Optimism Launch

Contracts were deployed to Mainnet and Optimism in late March of this year. We launched with 4 lending pools: wETH and USDC on Mainnet, and wETH and USDC on Optimism. Within hours of going live we hit the $500,000 supply cap in our USDC pool, and increased the cap to $750,000. Also, the following collateral assets were available for leverage trade at launch: DAI, FRX, FXS, OP, CRV, wBTC, SNX, UNI, LINK, USDT. Aditionally, we publicly announced our partnerships with Degenscore & 1inch, completed our second full protocol audit with Nethermind, and hosted Nethermind on twitter to discuss security best practices and how Arcadia is minimizing smart contract risk.

April 2023 — Improving the user experience & expanding Arcadia’s ecosystem

In April, we expanded the collateral assets available in the protocol to include: cbETH, wstETH, rETH. The inclusion of LSDs as collateral assets combined with Arcadia’s capital efficiency allowed users to consistently earn north of 20% on their wETH and to leverage their LSDs up to 10x to boost their staked yields.

Aditionally, the team announced a new partnership with Paraswap, and joined AladdinDAO and the Optimistic podcast to discuss the protocol, its architecture and the road ahead. We continued to increase our presence in DeFi front-ends, integrating Arcadia on deBank, renovated our documentation, and put out a Litepaper outlining the protocol and its first use cases. You can access them here and here.

Lastly, progress was made on improving the user experience. The team implemented the ability for users to wind-down positions in a single click, the ability for users to see impact of interest rate on their trades, and the ability for users to see in which markets they have assets straight from the trade interface. We also introduced a new feature to protect users from making undesirable trades in the app, comprising a price impact visualization and blocking the confirm button if the price impact is bigger than 50%. Finally, the team shipped a new dApp homepage and a redesigned page for Liquidity Providers.

The Road Ahead

We’ve learned a lot in the past months. For example, users are leveraged farming wstETH by taking advantage of Arcadia’s low borrow rates to profit from the spread between interest rates and staked eth yield. They are earning north of 20% on their ETH with basically zero liquidation risk. We expect to see more people leveraging Arcadia’s generalized architecture to create more strategies like this as we continue to roll out new features and integrations in the coming months.

We also have a number of cool things planned for Q2 that we’ll be releasing over the coming months:

Full UI/UX revamp — This has been one of the most requested upgrades to the current product, and we’ve been hard at work on it. We’ll release the new app look in Q2.

One-click strategies — Right now, the app is built around margin trading. But there’s much more that users can do with Arcadia. We will ship leverage strategies built on top of Arcadia’s margin account architecture to enable less advanced users to take advantage of the power of Arcadia’s core protocol with abstracted complexity.

New integrations — We’ve been working on something big that will bring the worlds of DeFi and NFTfi together. We hope to announce soon.

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Stay up to date with our latest updates and developments on twitter, discord, and github.