Why Arda and Why Now?

Citizens lack options to drive change

The name Arda was inspired by the legendarium of J.R.R Tolkien, as the name given to the world made up of an unbroken mass of land built through creative music.

We believe that blockchain technology is desperate for a new purpose and that the world is searching for a mechanism to drive itself forward. Web3 has introduced the world to the concepts of trustless decentralization, with two of the main implementations being crypto, focused on facilitating commerce, and non-fungible tokens that have sought to create artificial digital scarcity. However, to this point, it is a revolutionary technological advancement has yet to step into its role as a driver of the next era of progress.

The true magic of crypto and decentralization is disintermediation: the removal of layers of third parties between a person and the planetary-scale impact that individual seeks to make on the world.

An individual person concerned about climate change or increasing economic equality currently has limited options. Donating to charity, voting for a like-minded political candidate, or investing in a security such as the iShares MSCI Sustainable Development Goals ETF allows an investor or concerned citizen to direct resources towards the change they wish to see in the world. However, that person cannot directly drive that planetary-sale change themselves and even has little to no say in how that change is made. Without disintermediated collective action, an individual person is prevented from turning their values into action at scale.

DeFi as the tool for direct action

In building Arda, we asked: what if the future of crypto is not as a store of value or a facilitator of smart contracts but as a means of accumulating and organizing individual people's ethics, morals, and values and giving them expression in the real world?

A Web3 that digitizes and tokenizes each person's core guiding principles. A means by which we can turn our values and morals into bits of code, collate and organize them, and deploy them to effect desired change in the world?

Arda StableETF is an attempt to forge that new purpose by harnessing what we believe is the true power of Web3: the ability to assemble the collective will of a community and remove the intermediaries between the action that community wishes to take in the world.

In this vision, owning a digital asset would be a sociopolitical expression of who you are as a person in the same way that your registered political affiliation or the nationality on your passport.

Let's touch a bit on how the Arda ecosystem and something we are calling the Arda StableETF might work.