A Major Opportunity for Arch Developers
Tech rewards early movers. Especially in crypto, where token incentives are specifically created to bootstrap community overnight … and developers that capitalize can suddenly wake up to a wealth of users and valuable opportunities at their lap.
Just consider Fantasy.Top, the hugely successful Social-Fi app built on Blast. The trading card game skyrocketed to over 15,000 users during its testnet phase, and saw over $56 million of deposits flow into it just before its mainnet launch in April.
Such success wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just that its developer team matched a great idea with great execution. It also happened because Blast, as a new Layer 2 on Ethereum, knew it needed a breakout app to be relevant. And so it was highly incentivized to help Fantasy-Top and similar apps break out, from rewarding them with lucrative grants for developing on Blast to driving users and their wallets to them through its own points programs.
We’ve seen this dynamic play out again and again, from Fantasy.Top on Blast to Friend.Tech on Base: Viral apps that were incentivized to get in early on an emerging blockchain, drove interest to it, and saw a massive payoff as a result.
Now, Arch Network is poised to drive similar opportunities for its developer community, says CEO and Co-Founder Matt Mudano.
“If you have a breakout app, you may have the opportunity to make millions like Fantasy.Top,” Mudano says. “ But even if you don’t get $56 million in deposits, you’re still going to have the support of Arch through our developer incentives program, including significant resources allocated toward those projects that get in early to our Incentivized Testnet.”
How incentives are driving major value to developers on Arch
An early Bitcoin adopter, Mudano is crafting with Arch the first programmability layer capable of building directly on the base layer without fracturing any of its $1T+ liquidity in the process.
Unlike L2s and meta-protocols where users must bridge their assets first and then send the assets to a smart contract, Arch allows users to send their assets directly to the smart contract using a native UTXO-based Bitcoin transaction without bridging.
This means that developers don’t have to silo liquidity away from the main chain in order to build DeFi and other dApps on Bitcoin … making it far easier to drive Bitcoin wallets and their assets to them.
“Let’s say just 1/10th of Bitcoin holders started using Arch to securely do more with their Bitcoin, from earning yield through staking to borrowing on lending markets,” Mudano says. “Those users alone would be roughly tied with Tether for the third-largest market cap in crypto, trailing only Ethereum and Bitcoin.”
In coming weeks, Arch will be releasing more details about its community points program and testnet incentives for developers — however, those who want to be at the front of the line for those opportunities should get started now rather than risk missing out.
“I don’t know how many apps are going to participate, but the amount we’ve devoted to supporting our developers will remain the same — and it’s significant,” Mudano says. “It could definitely be a life-changing opportunity for those who participate in the testnet and beyond.”
What leading devs say about the opportunity of building on Bitcoin
Saturn, which became the first and only functioning orderbook on Bitcoin when it launched in spring 2023, is using Arch to pioneer what could be the first breakthrough DEX on the world’s most valuable blockchain.
For Hex, director of Saturn, the value of building the next break-out app on Bitcoin is a no-brainer. “You get to contribute to the biggest crypto brand in the world. You can build on other chains and they are over-saturated, horizontally scaling … or you can build on Arch with just a few teams and build some of the most critical infrastructure that Bitcoin has ever seen. To me, it’s one of the biggest opportunities out there.”
The roadmap is already clear for developers, says Siddarth Sridhar, founder and CEO of Bima Labs, creator of the Bitcoin-backed stablecoin USBD.
“Whatever was built on Ethereum within the last few years is now being built on Bitcoin within a span of a few months,” Sridhar said, adding that the Bitcoin ecosystem has “a higher total addressable market, more asset utilization in places like Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa, and ultimately more potential to unlock higher yield opportunities."
And it’s become even easier for developers to start building, since those who are worried about learning Rust can work with the Bima Labs team to transfer over to Arch. “You don’t need to pay the salary of one RUST engineer to use Arch — in three months, you can get a great deal to have your codebase in Solidity or any other programming language properly integrated into RUST.”
How to start building value with Arch
Arch is launching its community points program and testnet incentives for developers. Early adopters will have the best chance to be featured in our marketing and incentivization efforts.
Check out the developer docs and documentation book.
Apply for our developer incentives program here