Introducing ARTH v2

Steven Enamakel
MAHA
Published in
6 min readMar 16, 2021

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Every project goes through an evolution. At a certain stage, it is the right time for the product to evolve and go to the next level. ARTH the world’s first valuecoin has reached such a stage.

We launched ARTH in somewhat a beta stage in the month of January. Post many innovations, improvements, and inventions around the ARTH protocol and model, and amid invaluable feedback from the community on the governance portal, our advisors, and investors, the MahaDAO team is excited to continue in this blitzscaling mode through the next phase of evolution of ARTH.

Key highlights for ARTH v2 are as follows:

  • Protocol Controlled Liquidity (PCV)
  • No more EPOCHS. No more BONDS.
  • Introducing SushiSwap pools
  • A zero-gas fee migration for all LPs and ARTH token holders. The team pays for all the migration costs.

NOTE: As of writing ARTH v2 is not live. Please ignore any fake tokens or airdrops. The team will inform clearly when ARTH 2.0 is live and will publicize the token address when that happens.

Why ARTH v2?

ARTH at its current state has found itself ensuring stability on MahaSwap, a decentralized exchange developed by the MahaDAO team, however, this does not affect the price outside of MahaSwap.

Further, MahaSwap as a DEX itself faces challenges in terms of adoption, growing volume, and integration with other protocols.

ARTH v2 solves this problem by translating incentives/fees directly into the token itself, which allows the token to be easily integrated with pools such as SushiSwap or Uniswap.

Evolution to Protocol Controlled Value

Algorithmic coins, where the liquidity is owned by the protocol itself, have historically shown great amounts of stability. The best example is that of Frax finance which over the course of the last 3 months has maintained significant stability as compared to other seignorage-based coins.

In that regard, the team suggests that the best approach for ARTH to take is a similar route, in which the protocol controls most of the liquidity.

ARTH v1 — uncollateralized; ARTH v2 — Protocol owned collateral

This ensures price stability across well-known AMMs like Uniswap and further allows incentives/fees to automatically allow ARTH supply to scale up or down to meet the actual demand.

The new ARTH v2 will be merging the concept of PCV from Frax finance and Fei protocol, along with expansive concepts from Basis Cash protocol.

Removal of Bonds & Epochs

Bonds were first introduced by the Basis Cash team as a means of creating a system that could address a decline in demand by issuing debt to reduce the supply.

In theory, bonds happen to offer a well-stabilizing mechanism to help control the price; however, in practice, they have caused more harm than good.

As we’ve seen in the earlier days of ARTH v1, ARTH Bonds (ARTHB) creates a huge sell pressure that prevented the protocol from expanding when it actually had buy demand that could’ve grown it even further. Moreover, bonds were a debt that had to be repaid at a 20% premium, which means that ARTH supply had to outgrow even the premium for the protocol to be completely debt-free.

This makes it difficult to scale ARTH to the same extent as some of the more established stablecoins, that have managed to grow to a market capitalization of $1 billion+.

The new protocol will no longer have a need for epochs allowing the protocol to be much more flexible than the previous model.

Introducing SushiSwap pools & SUSHI Rewards for LPs

With the ability for the protocol to control the price using incentives/fees, there is no need to have an alternate DEX like MahaSwap, which applies those incentives/fees indirectly. This makes MahaSwap obsolete and allows the community to choose a more popular DEX to host its liquidity.

The team suggests that the protocol migrate to use SushiSwap pool so that LPs can farm Sushi tokens as rewards for providing liquidity to ARTH. We will be working with the SushiSwap community to get ARTH v2 LP tokens listed on the Onsen menu so that LPs can also farm SUSHI tokens aside from their MAHA/ARTH rewards.

Since SushiSwap is already monitored by many platforms, especially CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap, the price of ARTH on these platforms should reflect the price from these new pools.

Further, this allows ARTH to be easily integrated into platforms like CREAM, 1inch, etc that have integrated already with SushiSwap.

Migration from ARTH v1 to ARTH v2

All ARTH token holders and LPs will get a 1:1 airdrop of ARTHv2 along with LP tokens.

The team has been thinking hard about how to migrate liquidity and token balances without causing grievances to current token holders. Unlike other seignorage coins, ARTH is not behind a proxy contract; which means a token swap for ARTH will need to be conducted.

In previous migrations, many users complained about the high gas fees required to migrate tokens, costing anywhere between 100–300$ per transaction.

For this, the team has come up with the simple plan of snapshotting and airdropping new ARTH 2.0 tokens to current token holders. This way, all gas fees for migrations are paid for by the team and ARTH holders don’t need to do anything to participate in the migration.

All users will be credited exactly how much ARTH tokens they are owed and their liquidity will be assigned to them.

All exchanges and platforms (CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, Etherscan, etc.) will be informed of the new contract address for ARTH well in advance, to ensure that the migration will be smooth and well-coordinated.

A detailed migration plan will be documented and put out for a governance vote to seek the MAHA token holder’s approval before it is finally executed.

Audits and Public Beta tests

The new contract code will further undergo an audit and the team will conduct another round of public testing before the protocol is deployed onto the main-net.

The team acknowledges the need to have a rigorous public and open beta before the protocol goes live; to weed out any last-minute bugs or take into account any UI issues and/or glitches.

Hence, a 1-week public beta will be conducted before the protocol goes live.

Safe Experimentation

The protocol during the initial stage will bootstrap and disable timelocks for key functionalities until roughly 1–2 weeks of stability is achieved.

Further, all ownerships of contracts will be placed in multi-sig wallets before they’re handed over to the community for governance.

Conclusion

ARTH v2 is another huge step towards timeless value.

This update will have a significant impact on the stability of ARTH and sets up the world’s first value-coin to be implemented and integrated across various other platforms and protocols.

The team is also working on other products and forging new partnerships that’ll drive more value to ARTH token holders, so stay tuned!

We admire the work done by the Fei protocol team (Joe Santoro, Sebastian Delgado), Frax protocol (Sam Kazemian), and the Continous ESD team. Much of our work builds on what these protocols have worked upon and due credit needs to be given to them.

Timelines for ARTH 2.0 will be released shortly and we look forward to hearing from the community on their thoughts and feedback.

A vote will be passed for this major upgrade and we’d like to encourage the community to support and participate in ARTH v2!

NOTE: As of writing ARTH v2 and the migration is not live. Please ignore any fake tokens that might get airdropped into your wallet. The team will inform clearly when ARTH v2 is live and will publicize the token address when that happens.

For discussions around ARTH v2: Visit https://discuss.mahadao.com/c/arth-v2/9

About MahaDAO

MahaDAO is a community-powered, decentralized autonomous organization on a mission to empower billions to preserve their purchasing power through the world’s first valuecoin, ARTH.

MahaDAO Official Links

Telegram | Twitter | Discord | Github| Website | Governance Portal | Discussion Forum | Gitbook | Product

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