How I built ARTH - Stablecoin of MahaDAO to protect user's purchasing power
By: Mitul Gajera
Tags: Product Design Process, Decentralised Finance, Blockchain Startup, Defi Crypto, Stablecoin Cryptocurrency

The first version of ARTH was launched by MahaDAO in January 2021.

What is MahaDAO?

MahaDAO is a community-focused decentralized organization launching the world’s first value coin, ARTH, dedicated to solving inflation problems and bringing stability to the economy.

The Protocol employs a two-token system. The first being, ARTH a new type of currency designed to not be pegged to government-owned currencies (like US Dollar, Euro, or Chinese Yuan), but still remain relatively stable (unlike Gold and Bitcoin). Without being influenced by government-owned currencies, ARTH is backed by GMU(Global measurement Unit) and the Second token is governance token MAHA.

Overview

Since the team launched the first version of ARTH in January 2021 the team tried and tested different types of models to build a stable value coin until June 2021, whether it is a fully collateral-backed model, elastic supply model, Seigniorage Share model, or partial collateral model. The team tested all and finally got stability. It was foundation after which we can scale it through different products. here I remember a line by Paul Graham “In order to scale, you have to first do things that don’t scale at all”. In this article, I will explain my experiences and journey of building a platform to scale the ARTH.

“In order to scale, you have to first do things that don’t scale at all”

What’s next?

Product Vision

After getting stability, the core strategy was to build a platform that can scale the ARTH ecosystem for larger adoption. That’s where the ARTH Loan came into the picture. A product like this had always been a part of MahaDAO’s long-term plan. A product where users can take the most advantage through value coin without worrying about volatility so building ARTH Loan from which users can take a loan with zero interest and generate ARTH with leveraged position would be the right and perfect opportunity to grow market cap and users.

My Role and Responsibilities

I was the sole designer to work on an end-to-end process to design a cross-platform experience, a design system that allows us not only to design and build things more efficiently but also helps evolve the product faster multiple times a year.

Use-cases that we were focusing on after getting ARTH stability:

ARTH Loan — 0% interest loan platform that will use ARTH value coin as its primary asset to transact loans. Borrowers can take leverage and extract loans by collateralizing 110% of their crypto assets. Redeem — Users can redeem ARTH using different collaterals. Farming — Users can put different LP tokens to earn reward MAHA & ARTH Analytics — It’s a one-stop place to analyze protocol. apart from token stats, there are graphs to analyze ARTH loan stats, Revenue, and ARTH utilization.

What is the end goal?

This project aimed to ship the entire product experience on the web and mobile also, While testing ARTH for stability and different launches earlier, we found out that a decent number of users were coming from mobile devices also. so the product should be fully responsive and consistent across all the devices. As the ecosystem was growing, it was clear that major product design changes needed to happen to give simplicity. ARTH’s design needs to scale. The tricky constraint here was to move fast to build since we decided to launch ARTH Loans within 5 weeks after coming up with the idea.

Designing complex product can be difficult but by dividing it into important user experiences, you can make it approachable and double.

Background

In January, I worked on the Vault app which was the first version for ARTH adoption. we aimed to scale the adoption of ARTH through Vaults. In Vaults, people can put collateral and generate ARTH. their locked collateral will also generate some interest in the vault. but we stopped working on this product without launch and focused on testing value coins to stabilize ARTH with different models.