Impossible Finance Research Report #17 — Arken Finance

Context

With Centralized Exchanges often being the entrypoint into cryptocurrency for nascent users, they often provide the best user experience and have long been the backbone of the cryptocurrency markets. However, with incidents such as the FTX situation occurring, the dominance of CEXs has started to wane. Despite their convenience and popularity, recent crackdowns and increases in regulatory scrutiny has resulted in a loss of trust from its users.

As the cryptocurrency space and ecosystem continues to evolve, there is growing interest in decentralized exchanges that promise greater security, transparency, and control over one’s assets. However, the current user experience for on-chain traders thus far has not been anywhere near competitive enough compared to Centralized Exchanges. From problems such as liquidity fragmentation, price slippages and inefficiencies, sandwich attacks, to fake token pairs, the user experience for trading on-chain especially for new users is less to be desired. In addition to that, the trading process for users on-chain is often siloed and fragmented. Unlike Centralized Exchanges, there is no one stop platform that provides in essence an all in one solution for the trading process, which is often what users expect in the current day and age. When it comes to navigating the complex world of cryptocurrency, users often have to turn to a variety of different platforms and tools. For instance, those interested in discovering new tokens may need to visit data-specific platforms and block explorers, while those monitoring token prices may rely on platforms such as Coingecko, Dexscreener, and Dexguru. And for users looking to trade, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and DEX aggregators are becoming increasingly popular options due to their low fees, transparency, and security. From token discovery to monitoring prices, to swapping assets, most users will often encounter user friction due to having to interact with multiple platforms.

With this in mind, the need for a one-stop solution for an efficient on-chain trading process is essential to continue onboarding the next wave of on-chain users looking to hold their own assets. By reducing the pressures of having to navigate crypto on-chain, providing a similar trading experience to centralized exchanges enables protocols to have a smoother onboarding process, further pushing crypto adoption and decentralization.

Project Overview

Introducing Arken Finance, the Abstraction Layer for DeFi Protocols & User Experience. Arken helps abstract the complexity and unified liquidity and protocols to accelerate software development, making it easier for developers to build and create. On the user side, Arken provides the best user experience abstraction into a single user-friendly system over multiple networks, thousands of protocols, and millions of liquidity pools to make the transition to DeFi easy and painless.

Arken Finance aims to benefit users from the start to the end of the trading process and experience, from token discovery, to price monitoring and analysis, to trade execution, allowing Arken to be a trading portal aimed to provide a one stop solution experience for on-chain traders. Firstly, Arken is able to provide users with the ability to scout and discover new tokens through Arken’s Multi-chain Market page and Performance Comparison Tool. Arken’s Multi-chain Market page is able to provide users on its platform with quick and accurate data (Price in USD, Price % Change, Trading Volume, Market Capitalization, Liquidity, Number of Swaps, Token Age) on each token listed on its platform, enabling users to not only monitor token prices and metrics, but discover new assets on different chains picking up traction. Arken’s Performance Comparison Tool is able to complement this by allowing users to create comparables between assets listed, thus providing users with a more informed outlook when comparing assets across various markets, chains and asset classes. With crypto narratives often being rotated, it is often difficult for users to not only discover new trends, but to also be able to identify them early, and the introduction of Arken’s token discovery tools provides users with the necessary information to frontrun trends and narratives.

Furthermore, Arken’s Trading View and Price Alerts allows for easier price monitoring and analysis for on-chain traders. With crypto assets often being viewed as volatile and having larger price movements, the need for accurate and quick price updates is crucial for on-chain traders aiming to enter a position. Arken is able to incorporate real-time trading views across multiple DEXs, offering users a single point of entry to manage digital assets with ease and simplicity. Coupled with over 160 technical indicators and tools to personalize and analyze charts on Arken, traders on Arken are able to analyze price movements and identify opportunities quicker than any other platform. Traders can also take advantage of Arken’s price alerts to ensure that notifications are received when an asset has hit a desired price.

Arken is also able to maximize user experience and efficiencies for trade executions through the use of its DEX Aggregator. With liquidity for tokens being fragmented across not only various protocols but also chains, users often encounter friction when aiming to find the best possible price when purchasing or selling tokens. Arken’s DEX Aggregator is able to solve this by providing the most competitive prices for assets by indexing prices from multiple pools across DEXs on various chains. In addition to the most competitive rates as well as a multichain experience, Arken’s DEX Aggregator has innovative implementations putting them at the forefront of on-chain swaps. This can be seen through Arken’s two main innovations: TxFlow and Swap Engine 3.0 (Explained in Investment Thesis).

Project Highlights

• Supported ecosystems and partners include: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Binance Smart Chain

Quick Metrics

• TTS Allocated to Impossible Launchpad: 237,500,000 ARKEN
• Public Sale Token Price: 1 ARKEN = US$0.004 USDC
• Total Token Supply (TTS): 10,000,000,000 ARKEN

Investment Thesis

Ability to provide the most competitive swap pricings across DEXs and CEXs whilst maximizing user experience

Currently a lot of DeFi is still relatively complex, making it difficult for nascent users to navigate and participate within the ecosystem effectively. Wrapping your head around the various different aspects of DeFi such as AMMs, bridges, wallets all at the same time can be challenging to a new user, especially when the user experience for a lot of DeFi still leaves a lot to be desired. With Arken, they have managed to abstract a lot of the complexities within DeFi for a new user, creating an experience that allows users to absorb the benefits of a centralized exchange, whilst offering greater security, privacy and control to the user. For example, one of the biggest benefits of trading on a Centralized Exchange would be the sheer amount of liquidity parked on CEXs, compared to liquidity pools used by DEXs, allowing for lower price impact trades and a reduction in price slippage. Arken is able to solve this issue through the introduction of Arken’s Swap Engine 3.0 and TxFlow. By utilizing Arken’s Swap Engine, Arken is able to index prices from multiple liquidity pools across various DEXs, allowing Arken to provide on-chain traders on their platform to receive the best possible swap price when trading assets.

Moreover, on-chain traders that swap with larger volumes and size often face significant problems when trying to trade on DEXs. This is attributed to the often lack of liquidity for not only blue chip crypto assets but especially long tail assets. For example, long tail assets oftentimes face strains in their liquidity due to it being fragmented across various different chains and liquidity pools. However, by utilizing Arken’s split order feature, instead of having to manually monitor price changes across different liquidity pools, it automatically finds the best prices for trading pairs through searching multiple pools and splitting large orders across multiple routes to achieve the best possible price in a single transaction.

In addition to providing the best possible rates, Arken’s platform is also able to provide the most accurate rates through the use of TxFlow. TxFlow is the world’s fastest blockchain indexing engine, providing Arken with the ability to detect a change in price of any listed asset on Arken’s platform faster than any competitor. With cryptocurrency assets often facing large swings in price volatility, the importance of being able to index prices faster than any other DEX ensures Arken is able to provide accurate and competitive pricings for swaps, ensuring defensibility in the long run. Finally, Arken TxFlow is equipped with more capacity and scalability to support a wider range of tokens and users.

As such, with the features mentioned above, users are able to appreciate how Arken Finance is steadily able to compete with centralized exchanges in terms of overall user trading experience.

Pushing and supporting the overall on-chain ecosystem through standardized APIs:

Currently with the lack of standardized APIs within the space, it has created pockets of inefficiencies whereby available trading tools are fragmented into various DEXs. This creates issues where for larger private funds they’d have to utilize several different products in order to complete relatively simple tasks, which is why currently private funds and even individuals may still tend to stray towards CEXs. As such, by porting over Arken’s APIs, Arken is able to continually support the DEX ecosystem to offer even more complete services to its users. By doing so, it creates a positive sum game where users will start to have a better inclination towards DEXs similar to how CEXs all roughly have the same sort of products, creating an environment where the need for CEXs will slowly start to diminish as on-chain standards dramatically improve through the use of Arken.

Therefore, Arken Finance is able to position itself as one of the leaders continuously pushing on-chain narratives that will benefit the space as a whole as it continues developing an ecosystem that is not only composable, but also stays true to the ethos of web3.

Competitive Landscape

Arken Finance has been able to position itself within the DeFi ecosystem as a one stop shop trading portal and platform. With the ability to cater towards the entire trading process, and with so many different pieces to Arken’s product, there is no clear direct competitor for Arken Finance currently. However, we are able to break down Arken’s current features in order to compare Arken to indirect competitors.

1. Multi-chain Market Analytics: Arken’s Multi-chain Market page is able to provide users on its platform with quick and accurate data (Price in USD, Price % Change, Trading Volume, Market Capitalization, Liquidity, Number of Swaps, Token Age) on each token listed on its platform. When compared to other price data platforms such as Coinmarketcap, Arken is able to gain a competitive advantage in providing more accurate and real-time data for long-tail DEX assets, due to the sheer amount of DEXs Arken is able to partner and gain data from. This allows Arken Finance to ensure more competitive pricings for its users.
2. Swap Engine: Arken’s swap engine is able to compete with the current monopolies for DEX Aggregators, whilst being able to deploy extra features compared to other protocols such as Paraswap. Arken Finance is able to implement further features such as cross-chain swaps, stop-limit features for stop loss or taking profits, as well as improved limit orders, by ensuring that orders are filled as long as there is enough liquidity to swap within users’ slippage limits and requirements.
3. Trading View and Charts: Arken’s charts are able to update at a faster rate compared to platforms such as Poocoin or Dexscreener. Coupled with the implementation of the “Mid-Price Filter” on Arken’s platform, it essentially ensures that high-volatility price changes that occur in a small liquidity pool is filtered out to ensure that Stop-Limits and Limit Orders on Arken’s platform will not be triggered for users unreasonably, ensuring further user safety and protection.

Future Roadmap

Arken Finance will launch its Trustless Fund Management Platform, adding towards its features as a one-stop solution trading portal for both retail and institutional users. Arken aims to provide investors with the benefits of self-custody investment options, mitigating custody risks and security. Arken’s Trustless Fund Management Platform ensures that investors have full control over their assets, thus ensuring investors the ability to grant fund managers the authority to execute trades in the future without needing to forgo withdrawal rights.

In addition, Arken will also establish a DeFi Fund Marketplace, allowing analysts to share their strategies to the public. This can help provide analysts with the ability to scale investor management and support through Arken’s professional grade infrastructure and features.

Overall, Arken’s future roadmap will revolve around making DeFi more accessible for its users through creating technology layers that help abstract the complexity of decentralized protocols in order to help boost development speed, as well as leverage these technology layers to help build applications that help improve DeFi user experience, but also help with the process of migrating CEX users to DeFi. This can already be seen through Arken’s Trustless Fund Management Platform in the near future.

Team

The team behind Arken Finance is a well-established Venture Builder, based in Southeast Asia, established in 2006. The team is quite diverse — with developers, UXUI designers, and marketers within the team. The team originally is from a Web2-startup background. With this unique team composition, Arken Finance values the concept of user-centric the most, aiming to be the best trading portal and continuously improving to deliver the best user experience to our users. Arken strongly believes that we can bring real value & real solutions to the table for Web3 and DeFi.

Core Team Members

KIT, Strategy Lead

Tech entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in building and leading software product development teams. Kittichai has extensive experience in building products in several industries such as Social media analytics utilizing AI & Big Data; Image processing software specialized in character recognition; content distribution platforms for TV & publishing industries, logistics marketplace, insurance API gateway, and property tech.

CHIN, Product Lead

With a passion for continuous learning and staying ahead of industry trends, Chin led Arken in researching and developing new products and features. As an experienced Product Lead with a diverse background in web2 product development, as well as experience in Web3 research, DeFi research, and financial product research, Chin brings a unique perspective to his role at Arken Finance.

Chin’s core expertise is in product management, market analysis, and user experience design, enabling him to successfully launch innovative solutions that meet customer needs and drive growth. With a deep understanding of blockchain technology and a strong commitment to staying at the forefront of emerging technologies, he is excited to bring his skills and experience to the table and share it with DeFi space.

PJ, Technology Lead

PJ is a full-stack developer who has fallen in love with coding since he was a kid. With the 8-year of experience in web development from both a self-employed and co-founded software development company, he gained business-related experiences along the way. He is one of the most well-known developer community leaders in Thailand. Along with technical skills, PJ is also interested in how to utilize his skills to drive business values. Building the product people love to use from the ground up is one of his motivations for the goal to help make the world a better place. Web3 and DeFi is his main focus as it helps users to access financial tools in a decentralized way.

POR, Business Lead

Por leads the business & partnership aspects of Arken Finance. Por previously worked and gained extensive experience in management consulting for global corporations, as well as a leading corporate innovation powerhouse in Southeast Asia. Por has helped many startups grow their business and market throughout her career. Her background lies in decentralized finance, building business solutions, and corporate innovation.

Arken Finance Token Metrics

• Total Token Supply (TTS): 10,000,000,000 ARKEN
• Public Sale Hard Cap: US$1,000,000 (split into multiple pools)*
• Token Vesting: 100% distributed on day 1
• Buy-back Protection Program: Arken Finance has pledged to Buy-back ARKEN tokens in the event token price falls beyond a certain threshold. More details to be released soon.

• Day 1 Circulating Market Cap: 535,000,000 ARKEN
• Listing Price: US$0.004

Tokenomics:

Risk Evaluation

Arken Finance’s main risk as a one stop overarching trading platform for its users would be execution risk, due to the sheer amount of features Arken Finance has been able to push out. With Arken essentially targeting the whole on-chain trading process for users, execution risk for being able to continue pushing out all of its features and future roadmaps may seem extremely challenging. However, Arken Finance has been able to mitigate this risk through the strength of its core team as well as its track record of being able to continually push out products and features that are essential in onboarding the next wave of users from CEXs to DeFi. This can already be seen through the competitive advantages Arken’s features currently have over its competitors, from cross-chain swaps and stop limit features compared to other DEX aggregators, to providing the fastest and most accurate pricing data on not only mainstream cryptocurrency assets, but also long-tailed assets.

About Arken Finance

Arken Finance is the Abstraction Layer for DeFi Protocols & User Experience. Arken helps abstract the complexity and unified liquidity and protocols to accelerate software development, making it easier for developers to build and create. On the user side, Arken provides the best user experience abstraction into a single user-friendly system over multiple networks, thousands of protocols, and millions of liquidity pools to make the transition to DeFi easy and painless.

Website | Whitepaper | Medium | Twitter | Discord

About Impossible Finance

Impossible Finance is a multi-chain incubator, launchpad, and swap platform led by Ex-Binance & DeFi veterans. It offers a robust product-first ecosystem that supports top-tier blockchain projects to targeted user audiences. With extensive support from key leaders in the crypto industry, Impossible Finance simplifies DeFi for users to enjoy fairer investing, cheaper trading and better yields.

Website | Whitepaper | Medium | Twitter | Telegram

Impossible Tokens

IDIA token is the core governance and access token for allocation into our launchpad IDO sales.

IF token is the core governance and fee accrual for the swap and other non-launchpad products within the Impossible family.

Thanks for your amazing support, and let’s buidl the Impossible together!

Terms & Conditions:

• Notes: DISCLAIMERS, TERMS, and RISKS
• Risk Warning: Trading and/or generally investing in any cryptocurrency involve significant risks and can result in the complete loss of your capital. You should not invest more than you can afford to lose and you should ensure that you fully understand the risks involved. Before investing, please consider your level of experience, objectives, and risk tolerance, and seek independent financial and legal advice if necessary. It is your responsibility to ascertain whether you are permitted to use the services of Impossible Finance based on the legal and regulatory requirements of your country of residence and/or applicable jurisdiction(s)