The Blockchain Wizard: Aravindh Kumar Arcana is solving one of the biggest challenges in Web3 - friction in user on-boarding
By Saptak Bardhan •
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Aravindh's first exposure to the professional world was during his first year of engineering at a volunteer organisation called AIESEC, spread across 100-plus countries. He joined as a product manager at a startup studio called Wow Labz where he built over 10 products for other founders and helped it scale to millions of users.
Aravind is a first-generation founder and a majority shareholder in the business. It was in 2017/18 when Aravind and his co-founders were tinkering around building different use cases in web3, they realised the infrastructure and dev tooling available were not good enough to build reliable products. They understood that even before trying to build a use-case in web3, they would need to first solve the tooling and infrastructure problem which led them to start a decentralised cloud storage platform for web3 apps and to secure the data with end-to-end encryption, users needed to own public-private keys to encrypt and decrypt which posed another challenge because users didn't want to manage this. Hence, they built a key management solution that is user-friendly. "Once data is encrypted, you should be able to share it - so we built a decentralised access-control layer on top. Now you can onboard users, store their data, and securely manage it - all on the blockchain without using a server," said Aravind Kumar, co-founder, Arcana.
Arcana is solving one of the biggest challenges in Web3 - friction in user on-boarding. When users first enter a web3 app, they need to install a wallet, back up their seed phrase and private key. Go to an exchange, do a KYC, transfer fiat from the bank to the exchange and buy crypto, and then transfer this back to their wallet to use it on the app. Arcana's SDK allows users to log in to the app with their email ID, the company creates an in-app wallet that looks like a chat widget. Users can then buy crypto right from the in-app wallet and start using the app.
The company released its testnet a few months ago and has on boarded over 50 projects so far. Its mainnet is set to go live in the 3rd week of January and most of the customers would push the integration to production during the times. The company has collaborated with Swaraj in the Music NFT space, Interality in the metaverse, and Ticketh in NFT ticketing.
"Strive for great products and great distribution. Build for customers and obsess over their problems. Most insights are inferred and don't come directly from asking questions - the better you build this muscle - the faster you'll be able to find PMF and scale," added Kumar.
2022 was a wild year with global economic shifts and turmoil in crypto markets. The company shipped two test nets, narrowed down its positioning and GTM, executed some key partnerships, and grew consistently month-on-month. Arcana ended the year with a successful audit of its codebase for its production release in January.
Being a decentralised network changes the metrics of break-even for Arcana. The network will be open-sourced and decentralised, run by independent resource providers. The token model would power its business model and economics. The breakeven is a healthy balance of buy and sell pressure of Arcana's token - since the token is used to charge customers and pay resource providers and expenses. Profitability is based on managing the share of the token supply that the protocol owns and participating in the network like any other token holder. The company is currently pre-token-launch.
Arcana is currently catering to EVM chains like Ethereum and expanding to a multi-chain approach to support other blockchains. The company intends to launch two products: storage and access. The company wants to grow its inbound marketing team.
