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 Arrakis team set out to solve these problem by building a protocol that offers trustless market making infrastructure and strategies. LPs can leverage Arrakis in order to create markets for crypto assets that exceed the efficiency and liquidity depth of those created on CEXs while enjoying a similar passive LP experience that they are used to from older Uniswap versions.

The project, first being part of Gelato Network, later spun out into its own project after receiving substantial organic traction among multiple web3 protocols that shared the same vision. It is now completely separate and operates independently.

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.