Pulling Back The Curtain: The Story and Next Steps of Arch Protocol
Introduction
They say every journey begins with a single step. It’s the steps you take and how you make them that determines the destination and the quality of the route that is taken. We at Arch Protocol have taken our first steps over the last few days and wanted to lay out and illuminate our plans a bit more so the community can have an idea of who we are and where we are headed. No hidden messages, no reading between the lines, just transparency about who we are, our plans and intentions, and our next steps. We hope you take the time to read through and get a better understanding of our process as we build trust and understanding about the future of Arch Protocol and the ideas and innovations we will attempt to bring to the space over the coming weeks/months. We hope this message reaches you and travels as far as you’ll let it.
The Men Behind The Machine
In the world of Cryptocurrency, the decentralized nature of the beast brings such great power and avenues to those who create. However, as they say, with great power does come great responsibility and often times, when that power is abused, that is where the wheels being to fall off the machine. We see that time and time again with an over-saturated market of developers who, instead of spending their time working and creating a solid community, use their energy and resources to fool investors who are looking to make a quick buck. One scam turns into another which turns into a world that, with good intentions, is ripe with people who just want to take, take, take. It’s awful, and in return, becomes, a toxic environment where investors (rightfully) demand all sorts of information in order to protect themselves from the next big ‘rug pull’. The trickiness of it happens due to the fact that the demands and question then become the antithesis of what a decentralized ecosystem is meant to be. The two don’t work together. However, how do you build success that way? Frankly, you build trust. Most importantly, you show the community that they just need to trust the code. Examine the codes that are being laid out, see how they, themselves are trustless, and realize that even if the people behind them are not the best of men, they are powerless to a code they created. If the code is solid, that’s that. There is nothing else that can be done. It works and it is good. However, there is obviously a bit more than that. You also have to establish yourself in a space as people who are proven entities in the crypto world. It makes the first steps (the ones we are taking now) the hardest, but also makes them the most valuable and, hopefully, profitable for investors and the team alike.
The team behind Arch Protocol (Arch, Ein, and Pious) are men who have worked together in the space over the last few years on different projects here and there under different alias’ as they were figuring the space out. They each serve different roles in regards to their strengths and weaknesses, and have worked together at this point, to create a name for themselves under these pseudonyms to not only build their own reputation, but also build their community as one that works together and trusts each other. For those who have worked on their own tokens in the past, you obviously know that its a space that involves a lot of moving parts and also involves a lot of work that people often don’t have the patience or understanding for, yet those parts are necessary.
As stated on our telegram earlier yesterday, Arch (the real technical brains behind the operation) was a doxxed team member of a utxo based coin back in 2017 during the previous bull run. Working on a token at that point that had almost a half a billion dollar marketcap until the crash came. The crash causing death threats and the like, this is what caused the need for privacy. But, as we said, trust the code. As said in our telegram, the solidity side of everything is new to us, we were proficient in C++. As we worked to build, we hoped to add team members with full stack experience to join us on our mission to become one of the most trusted group of developers in the space. It’s all a part of the process.
The ARCH Launch: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
What a couple of days it has been since the launch of ARCH. In our private conversations we have spoke of it in a way as it being sort of a “perfect storm” of bad. However, we (mostly me, Pious), also made mistakes that didn’t help either. These things happen, and that’s okay.
So, let’s start with the beginning. As we started the launch with our mysterious undertones, it was strictly done in a format to build hype and mystery. When you’re ‘new’ to a space, you have to make yourselves stand out and build some sort of mystery. We know that, no matter what, people will call it ‘stupid’ or get angry that it’s just an ‘altered fork’ or things like that. It always happens. However, this is a space where people are looking for a store of value, and, sometimes, small alterations with solid community building, trust building, and communication, can do great things. Ask yourself this, how many tokens and/or forks out there have an incredibly asinine value and really offer no function at all. The hype train is real. We understand that. It’s why we continue to build and move and strive to become a group that has hype behind a project when the names of Arch, Ein, Pious and future team members are mentioned. We want to be the reason YOU invest. Because, you trust us to do right by you.
I’ve gone off the beaten path a bit, so back to the main point. We launched with mysterious undertones to build hype around our project while also initially throwing other downside costs on marketing to get ourselves in a position to succeed. Marketing is incredibly important and those who are successful marketers in this space demand a stupid amount of money, and if they are successful, they are worth it. However, it’s costs that go in before a token is even launched. This, along with time spent developing, and the need to hire future team members caused us to set a presale hardcap of 333 ETH while adding 120 ETH to liquidity. This, obviously leaves a large amount of money left that would have been used to 1) Market continually, 2) Hire Developers, 3) Pay web designers, artists. When a developer with a known name does something like this, people do not bat an eye because the token makes investors money. When unknown developers do it, we learned that, if marketing isn’t strong, it’s harder to fill. It’s a trust issue, and rightfully so, people have questions “because it’s just a fork” (Even though it’s not). We also went with a lower initially liquidity due to the fact the protocol is designed to reward liquidity providers, thus not needing to bury all the raised resources into initial liquidity with Uniswap.
*Note from Pious: I will admit, though, it’s frustrating to see another token raise 300 ETH yesterday even though it had a ton of warning signs and immediately rug on their community. It shows how marketing is important.
So, regardless, our journey began. We had lined up a marketing AMA with a successful group of over 14,000 members and due to unforseen circumstances with them (not their fault at all), the AMA fell through as we were set to have it 30 minutes prior to our presale launch. The hope was to answer questions and show our transparency at that time, but, as stated before, it was a perfect storm that just didn’t work out. So, before our presale even started, an AMA we promised our community already was not happening and kept pushing back and back and back.
Then, in our biggest misstep, as people entered the chat minutes before presale began with their usually ‘hype’ or ‘fud’ or ‘questions’ or ‘demands’, I (Pious) let my emotions get the best of me when I banned a man who came with harsh language that I deemed inappropriate. My emotions were high as things seemed to be falling apart one thing after another and I quickly hit ban. I stand by my reasoning for doing it, but I should have given a warning and shouldn’t have let my emotions show in that regard. It was a mistake that I made, that I apologized to him about quickly after. However, the damage was done to some of the community members who were there for the pre-sale. As we have said in private, “lessons learned”.
With all of those ‘pieces’ falling into place being a perfect storm of ‘bad’, it put us into a tricky situation. Out of the 333 ETH that we were going to raise, we only raised 89 ETH in a few hours. The community who had invested wanted answers, and we were left on the fly deciding what to do next. It was our first time asking the community what steps they thought should be taken. They spoke and we answered. We would burn the unsold presale tokens and list.
This burn and raising only 30% of our funds caused us issues that we still work to navigate. Since we don’t have team tokens or tokens to give to marketers (who would most likely dump), we are left without funds to hire a developer and other hands to work on things. The budgeting we had done went out the window. However, we had made our first step into building the community and we aren’t going to let them down. With burning more than 60% of our presale tokens, we listed. Arch Protocol was officially live. A token that borrowed mechanisms from both Sav3 and ITS in ways that were meant to award exclusively liquidity providers and reduce total supply, was up and running and working well.
With all the trouble that we had gotten initially, the launch was a massive success. Hype was building, people were excited, the value of the token had risen to have 2x its listing. We knew that we’d have to survive the usually Uniswap listing pump and dumps, but we were thrilled with an exciting launch.
But then…..
We went to sleep. Developers worst nightmares. All of us living in the same part of the world, we all went to sleep after a long week of planning and, you know, Christmas and stuff. When we went to sleep a DDoS attack took place on our website and took it offline, with none of us around to answer for it. We each received ransom messages in our DMs, but at that point, with the website offline, people already assumed that we, too, were part of the ‘rug squad’ and had taken our non-existent funds and went home. The price plummeted far below pre-sale price and our telegram chat became abandoned. Once we woke up, we promptly told the attacker to get lost and we were able to fix the problem with the site. Once again, lesson learned.
So, here we sit, developers who are making our move to become some of the most trusted and respected developers in the space with our first project in the ecosystem just underway. Was it perfect? Hell no. Did the value plummet to 50% of presale to only, just recently, make its way back up to just above listing price? It sure as hell did. But….
Are we 100% honest with you and have we already started to slowly build a community of amazing investors who appreciate our transparency and, at the same time, support each other as well? Yes, and we sure have.
We are excited about the future.
Before we talk about the next steps, let’s take a quick look at where ARCH stands currently….
ARCH PROTOCOL (Currently Available On Uniswap)
Total Original Supply: 32,000 ARCH
Presale Supply Burnt: 17961.792 ARCH
Rectitude Function Burnt: 7656.367 ARCH
Current Supply: 6381.841 ARCH (Decreasing every 2 hours or when Rectitude is called)
Current Marketcap: $96,663.26 USD
Next Steps:
Let’s start with the obvious. We are still waiting for Etherscan to approve some things so our Dextools score will raise. We have no idea why it’s taken this long, but it should be happening soon. Also, yes we’ve applied for Gecko. Honestly, they won’t list us with volume as low as it currently is, but hopefully in time we will be able to raise that.
We are currently working on creating a NEW TOKEN for our Ecosystem. At this juncture we chose not to name it, and we are currently reviewing the tokenomics which makes the most sense for the ecoystem. The goal of the token is to make sure it ties in with ARCH. It is going to be farming based that further incentivizes LP Providers for the ARCH/ETH Pairing. Users will be able to stake their UNIV2 Tokens to receive portions of this new token. Furthermore, Token X holders will also be able to stake to receive a portion of the allotted staking allocation. We will likely be running a small presale for this as well to gather additional funding to create an initial liquidity pool here and further resources to build out the ecosystem further
As we have said before, we didn’t reach our hardcap with ARCH, so our funds aren’t available to throw money at developers. Once the contracts/front end work is done for Token X, we can gauge interest and hopefully raise additional resources required to hire on more help to expedite further development. Until then, we will work as hard as we can to meet the high expectations we hold for ourselves.
To Conclude
This is just the beginning. One of our long term goals is for when you hear our names you get that sense of comfort knowing that we aren’t going to mess around, and instead, are going to be working to get things done in the best possible way.
That said, we do that together. We need our community. We appreciate our community, and we appreciate those who stick by us. We will talk to you all soon.
Big things are on the horizon.
-The ArchProtocol Team.
Helpful information:
Dextools: https://www.dextools.io/app/uniswap/pair-explorer/0xef841312c610a6340a0235e4e26ca7a0ecb09635
Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?inputCurrency=0x97f3d01339215916994c9f40f61b89921c613b4d
Liquidity Locked in Contract (90 Days): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x08741be3bd6a1e9a3fc202af504c99e6401ac40e4020c0b9a81e28e43d15f363
Website: archprotocol.io
Twitter: @ArchProtocol
Contract Address: https://etherscan.io/address/0x97f3D01339215916994c9f40f61b89921c613b4d#code
Go Forth. Spread the Society. https://t.me/archprotocol
