How ARCO works
One place on Arc where capital goes to trade and to earn.
Swapping
Type an amount and we ask every venue on Arc for a price: ARCO's own pools and the other exchanges. You see all of them, the best one is picked for you and the trade goes there. Inside ARCO there is nothing on top of the pool fee. When a better price lives somewhere else we still take you there, for a 0.05% routing fee that goes to ARCO lockers. Set your slippage, hit swap, done. Gas is paid in USDC because that is what Arc runs on.
Providing liquidity
Pools are concentrated. You do not spread your tokens over every possible price, you pick a range. Inside that range your capital is working and collecting the pool fee on every trade. Outside it you hold one token and wait. That is the arch: solid where you earn, faded where you do not, the dot is the market right now.
- Tight range: more fees per dollar, more time out of range.
- Wide or full range: fewer fees per dollar, almost never out of range.
- LPs keep 87.5% of the fee. 12.5% goes to the people who lock ARCO.
- Your position is an NFT. Collect fees any time, close whenever you want.
Locking ARCO
Every fee the protocol keeps, from pools and from routing, is pushed into the staking vault and split among lockers by weight. Weight is your amount times a multiplier: 7 days gives 1x, one year gives 4x, anything in between scales in a straight line. Lock 1,000 ARCO for a year and you count like 4,000 locked for a week.
- Rewards arrive in USDC and ARCO, and in any other token the vault lists. Claim whenever.
- The ARCO itself comes back when the lock ends. There is no early exit.
- You can top up or extend a lock. The end date only moves later.
- Anyone can trigger the harvest that moves pool fees into the vault. It is not held by anyone in between.
What the team can and cannot do
- Can: enable new fee tiers, list reward tokens, and move the protocol cut between 10% and 14.3%. The contract refuses anything above that.
- Cannot: take USDC or ARCO out of the fee collector or the vault, touch your positions, pause swaps, or mint ARCO. Supply is fixed.
- Fees that arrive in tokens the vault does not list are swept, sold for USDC and pushed back into the vault.