History

Background

Arrakis Finance started in early 2021, shortly after the Uniswap v3 whitepaper was released. The introduction of concentrated Liquidity AMMs promised to finally disrupt the need for traditional Centralized Exchanges (CEX) in terms of efficiency, enabling AMMs to behave similar to their Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) counterparts.

These substantial efficiency improvements over older constant product AMMs unfortunately came at the cost of Liquidity Providers (LPs) facing substantial complexity and overhead associated with trying to fully leverage the potential of providing liquidity in a concentrated fashion on Uniswap V3.

The project, first being part of Gelato Network, later spun out into an independant project after receiving substantial organic traction and going on to have $1.8B TVL.

Arrakis has gone on to facilitate $20B in volume traded.

Since mid 2023, Arrakis has been focussed on the next generation of AMMs and MEV recapture to tackle the biggest threat Ethereum faces: extractive centralised actors.

Centralised Actors Taking Over DeFi

We are in the midst of a shift in DeFi. As Ethereum has grown, sophisticated actors have infiltrated DeFi and leveraged complex strategies to extract value from the ecosystem.

Naturally this has increased the scope of the problem statement Arrakis is tackling. It has grown to encompass recapturing MEV from centralised actors who are extractive to the ecosystem. Arrakis aims to give token issuers and LPs a fairer share of the pie.

Arrakis is focused on being a decentralized onchain market making solution, with a key feature of built-in MEV-Awareness / vertical integration into the MEV supply chain. Arrakis aims to give all token markets a seamless next-generation onchain spot market liquidity provision experience.

Inspiration

The name Arrakis comes in reference to Frank Herbert’s Dune Universe. Arrakis is a harsh desert planet full of dangers and mineable riches (the fabled “spice melange”), which echoes the similarly harsh, dangerous and yet financially potent world of crypto.