The Arkadiko Vision

Arkadiko has come a long way since our initial announcement, and are heartened by the community’s support for our project. Today, we hope to share our vision for Arkadiko with the community and the role it plays in the wider Stacks ecosystem.

Arkadiko Finance was named after the Arkadiko bridge, a Mycenaean bridge near the modern road from Tiryns to Epidauros on the Peloponnese in Greece. Dating to the Greek Bronze Age, it is one of the oldest arch bridges still in existence. It serves to reflect the vision and values at Arkadiko Finance where we seek to construct the building blocks to power Decentralized Finance (DeFi) that can withstand the test of time. This led us to build on Stacks blockchain that is secured by the Bitcoin Network. It was a deliberate decision that we took to build exclusively on Stacks protocol due to its unique consensus mechanism (Proof-of-Transfer) that tethers to the Bitcoin Network and clarity programming language’s ability to view the Bitcoin State. The Bitcoin Network is by far the most durable and secure blockchain in the industry, along with Stacks smart contracts capabilities, we seek to design and ship products that go beyond just utility, but also empowering more users to participate in DeFi in an intuitive and accessible manner.

We see Arkadiko Finance as an Agora (Greek word for “an open public meeting space”) for DeFi users, folks from around the world would gather at Arkadiko to engage in various DeFi activities. Some will use Arkadiko to borrow stablecoins (USDA), while others may become a liquidity provider, an external liquidator, or simply just to swap their favourite tokens. Arkadiko Finance is building the core engine of DeFi, and also a place where it’s easy for users to navigate and make financial transactions in a permissionless and secure manner. As the team envision Arkadiko to be the meeting space for DeFi users, security is our top priority thus the team have made a conscientious decision to build on a protocol that utilizes the security of the Bitcoin Network.

Arkadiko plays a synergistic role in Stacks by enhancing STX token’s capital efficiency by retaining value within the ecosystem through a native stablecoin. Users post their STX tokens as collateral to mint native stablecoins, thereby allowing liquidity and capital to be recycled within the Stacks ecosystem, greatly enhancing its efficiency. The Bitcoin Networking playing the role as the settlement layer for Stacks, while Arkadiko provides key infrastructures to enable Stacks ecosystem to operate more efficiently, which enhances the utility of each Bitcoin block thereby creating a positive feedback loop in value accretion.

As Arkadiko operates at the forefront of technology and is part of the Web3 movement, to remain nimble and innovative is part of our DNA. We chose to build DeFi on Bitcoin because we believe that there are an abundance of unexplored opportunities for 1) Bitcoin to be the settlement layer and 2) the need to pair financial services with secured networks. In the following series of blog posts, we will be sharing more about Arkadiko’s products and how they are pioneering new use cases to DeFi and the Bitcoin Network.