There’s a strange sense of “whiplash” writing this now, just months after a period when crypto felt quiet. Markets were uncertain, capital was sidelined, trends and narratives were bleak or did not seem to be impactful in the long run.

That phase of the cycle hasn’t been kind to all. We saw one of the largest hacks in recent memory, and the broader space went through a period of memecoin euphoria that ultimately resulted in one of the biggest liquidity extractions from the space. Ethereum also saw an existential crisis where its mindshare and position as a major was briefly questioned.

Since then, the tide has shifted with the re-election of Trump sparking early signals of a regulatory reset, with crypto becoming a geopolitical and economic talking point throughout the world. With that Bitcoin has surged to new all-time highs on the back of institutional inflows, ETF momentum, and renewed macro and consumer confidence. But beneath the surface euphoria, the cracks in the lack of projects with actual fundamentals, sustainable revenue generation or product-market fit have only become more apparent.

They say that tech moves quickly, but the meta in this crypto space shifts even more rapidly because of how nascent the space is. Talking to the builders in ARC a couple of months ago, there was a strong consensus that there is this air of stagnancy in the development of new and compelling concepts that are able to find some ideal market fit within CT outside of core verticals like DeFi, stablecoins, protocols and infrastructure building etc. Instead, what we’re actually seeing are a slew of projects that try to quickly go to market with a fresh narrative with misaligned incentives that ultimately fail to maintain momentum and gradually lose mindshare and adoption altogether.

There is, however, a silver lining, that crypto is maturing. It seems like this period of crypto may be the first time the space will experience an era of dApp-based building at scale vs what we have been more familiar with in the past where protocols and infra development have traditionally been prioritised. This to me, is great news as it means that we’re finally getting to a stage of development where the skillsets of people like product designers and creatives become a priority. That can only be a plus for the onboarding of new users who have traditionally been turned off by the inaccessible, high friction experience native to crypto.

With that in mind, ARC remains highly optimistic in the development and progression of the space with the intent of building scalable Web3 products as a core revenue stream for us. These products will prioritise bringing value back to our members (as per our intent to optimise for community-led growth) but also hopefully, with time, to future users outside of our immediate community.

For ARC as a product on its own however, as a founder in Web3, I know what everyone is waiting for, which is essentially the launch of a token. As someone who has been through 3 cycles now, I am well aware that “metas” come and go quickly. While there is a very strong temptation to jump onto the “next shiny object” which is trending, as a long-term centric founder, I have never felt a strong motivation to launch a token based on short-term centric thinking like “Elroy, let’s launch now, the token will make money” or “April will be a good month to TGE”, or that “the narrative is new, we need to be the first movers”.

There is no other way, as brand and repute are paramount to me, the ARC team, and our members and launching tokens haphazardly out of your main brand can be devastating in the long-run.

With that being said, 2025 is the year that ARC is laser-focused in preparing what is necessary to ensure a successful token launch down the line. The foundation is established, the community is thriving and engaged (could be better, yes and we are working on this), and the road ahead is clear. We’ll be kickstarting the next arc for ARC via ARC.xyz and more information on what we’ve been cooking will be unveiled in the upcoming months.

I hope to achieve what most, if not all, DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) have failed to achieve in the past: creating a community-first structure that is capable of social coordination of diverse individuals towards collective goals.

Why, you ask me, do I want to accomplish that?

ARC's inception stemmed from a generic Web2 idea. A couple years or so before COVID, the early core stakeholders and ourselves questioned the absence of a purpose-driven online community that we aspired to be a part of. While interest-based communities were prevalent on platforms like Facebook and Reddit, we found it peculiar that purpose-driven communities (E.g. offline business groups that collectively created value together), which existed in the real world, did not have an online equivalent.

So we jumped on the idea thinking that hey, no one was doing it yet, and with the networks that we had, it seemed like we were positioned at the right place and time to go about assembling this curated collective under a single banner of collective value creation.

We took the first 2 years since launch to bring this community together. Through an application-only membership process, and via Web3 tools like NFTs to create a sense of ownership in what we are building together, we were able to close the mint last year at 887 members.

Today, we are a collective majority made up of non-retail passionate builders and active investors working to push the Asian Web3 space forward in everything we do. Across the board, here’s a glimpse of the founders, builders and investors across a broad range of projects including:

• Protocols: Aethir, Aptos, Base, Grass, Ithaca, Kelp DAO, Monad, Polygon, Taiko, Thetanuts
• DeFi: Bluefin, Kyber, Meteora, Optimex, Pendle
• Platforms: Backpack, BitGo, BitMEX, BTSE, Bullish, Coin98, Coinbase, CoinGecko, Coinhako, Derebit, Etherscan, FailSafe, Infinex, Libeara, MoonPay, Nansen, OKX, Photon, PokPok, Shuffle, StraitsX
• VCs / Funds / MMs: Amber Group, Animoca, Arcane, CTH, Egirl, Fisher8, Formless, HashKey Capital, Impossible Finance, Lingfeng Innovation Fund, Mask, Mirana Ventures, Ouroboros Capital, Pantera Capital, Parc Capital, Signum Capital, QCP, Wintermute
• Consumer Crypto: Doodles, Memeland, Mighty Bear Games, Mocaverse, Pudgy, YGG
• AI: Sovrun, Virtuals
• Services / Marketing / Media: Arcadia, Forbes, Glimmer DAO, Gnosis HQ, Rug Radio

I have shared about this in previous interviews I’ve done. The origins of ARC as a name was inspired by roman arches, the architectural foundations that built the Roman civilisation. With what we have created, we are building the foundations for a brand new digital world that connects and brings people together to do things together.

The potential for what we can achieve together as a single entity is immense. Like the tagline we had in our initial launch days in 2022, “when like-minded people come together, the possibilities are endless”. However, there is one core thing that will be our stumbling block if we do not execute on it well. And that is fundamentally the challenge of social coordination.

If we think back on the early days of Web3, that was what the thesis for DAOs was. They were hyped up as an utopian entity of the future where internet-native communities could socially coordinate a group of individuals to act in an aligned manner without centralised leadership.

We all know what happened there. The failings of the earliest renditions of DAOs come from several factors. One of them being that most DAOs focused entirely on the community and token coordination aspect while forgetting the importance of prioritising how members would derive value directly from the entity. At the same time, many of the necessary social infrastructure, coordination tools and technologies like AI were not ready for that future (yet).

However, the landscape is entirely different now, with the space maturing greatly along with the ascent of AI development in the last couple of years that helps to further digitalise a community with real working efficiencies by solving and automating workflows. In the Web2 space, many businesses have already tapped on AI and AI agents to increase the productivity of their existing workforce. Through automating regular workflows that involve coordination of diverse individuals, it frees everyone else to focus on higher-level thinking and ideation work. Today, we believe the conditions are finally in place to turn the original thesis for DAOs into a reality.

To be clear, our vision isn’t necessarily to become DAO. As per what we have shared in the previous chapters of this series, ARC has never positioned ourselves as a typical NFT project or looked at Web3/crypto as an end in and of itself. We are highly convinced in our vision and believe that blockchain technology and digital assets like NFTs and fungible tokens are important tools to help us achieve our community and business goals. What we do want to achieve are the end outcomes of what a viable and successful DAO could be like -

As I have said before, we are now at a perfect moment in history to unleash the full potential of individuals acting collaboratively as a single whole. With an aligned collective of diverse individuals, we can go on to launch new businesses, products, services and even fresh brand IPs under this core entity. Our collective and the networks connected with our members now have a social media following in the hundreds of millions across multiple social media platforms. Imagine every member acting together as a single entity to advocate for any new venture that ARC launches (Web3 or Web2).

In the first chapter of this series, I wrote about the rise of Community-as-a-Brand entities in this new post-COVID digital era and how they will outcompete traditional Web2 organisational models.

In the second chapter, I further explored the concept of these Community-as-a-Brand entities in driving community-led growth to achieve an entity’s business goals by adopting Community Market Fit (CMF) before achieving Product Market Fit (PMF). I also briefly touched on how fungible tokens can be leveraged to activate a “broader workforce” for advocacy and growth.

With this third chapter in the series, I will discuss how ARC will solve for social coordination at-scale. The desired end outcome is the creation of a socially autonomous organisation that founders and projects (even those outside of ARC) can harness in order to aid them in their GTMs and commercial goals.

To illustrate how socially autonomous organisations work and how they can create accelerated impact for founders and projects, let’s start with a typical Web3 GTM today.

We use the term ‘Projects’ here to refer collectively to a diverse slate of entities (e.g. platforms, protocols, crypto-related products) in Web3 that are in the business of delivering a product or service to builders and users in the space.

A typical GTM would usually involve a project focusing on onboarding builders and users to use their product with the plan towards revenue-generation directly or indirectly.

The road towards user acquisition and sustainable revenue-generation is often a long and arduous one. From raising funds to bring together the right people, building the product, planning the GTM, tapping on KOLs, growing the community, launching and expanding the user base, this is something that can easily take anywhere between 12 to 24 months before a project starts generating revenue on a stable, recurring basis.

On the other hand, with a socially autonomous organisation like ARC (where the core team leads a collective of 887 members), this process is accelerated due to the aggregation of financial, social and knowledge capital in one entity.

Need capital allocation or optimisation of your cap table? Curate a list of qualified angel investors and VCs that specialise in your Web3 domain from within the community.

Need partners to build your product? Share your PRD and invite collaborators to reach out.

Need a GTM plan? Contact marketing agencies within the community that have accumulated expertise and shown actual merit from a vast database of past clientele.

Need KOLs to help trial the product and create content and distribution around it? Put together a SWAT team made up of people that have a vested interest in your domain whether it’s defi, gaming or AI and enroll them in product demo testing.

Put it another way. Imagine you were building a new home for yourself and you had to coordinate with 30 different parties and make trips to 50 different suppliers to get everything you needed. Now consider that you only had to join forces with a single partner who could work closely with you on all the requirements you have. Wouldn’t that be a more ideal approach for you as a founder and project?

Whether you’re an ARC member within the collective or just a builder in the space, partnering with a socially autonomous organisation is likely to reap more effective and efficient results. What’s also crucial to note is that this model of working is very much the future state of play for an AI-trained, digital-savvy global workforce that can work from anywhere in the world. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn shared in this viral video clip about how the concept of ‘employees’ is going to change profoundly from primarily traditional contract jobs to a more gig-based economy model.

So the next obvious question: how do we go about creating such a socially autonomous organisation?

SAOs are essentially digital-first institutions that are:

1. Born from a community that is purpose-driven
2. Sustained through stable revenue streams
3. Scaled with an organic distribution pool of users in Web3 and the real world
4. Coordinated with a social currency
5. Powered by AI and designed for long-term resilience

With the creation of ARC‘s initial community, SAOs are the next phase of expansion where we imagine a larger ecosystem of participants that, together with the core community, will continue to socially collaborate towards the achievement of larger collective goals. I believe that in this highly digitalised world we live in now, SAOs will be a blueprint for how humans will organise and participate in work, life and play in the future.

But building this future doesn’t happen by accident. It requires intentional design; one that links economic, cultural, and technological layers into a single, self-reinforcing system.

This topic has been largely covered in the earlier chapters of this series: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.

TLDR; SAOs should be built, ground-up with community-centric thinking. This includes creating a core narrative with components like key values and a shared purpose that people can rally around. This narrative will have to be communicated and aligned frequently with members to promote an ongoing self-renewal process over time (members who feel a dissonance with this shared narrative will leave while others who resonate with this shared narrative will join).

To create deep emotional attachment to the community, the core team needs to ensure that members derive intrinsic and extrinsic value from being part of the community continuously. This work is highly unscalable but extremely crucial for bringing together a core collective of people that feel a deep sense of pride and belonging to the entity.

At ARC, we have spoken before about how we’re looking to build a first-of-its-kind powerhouse for investment, collaboration and incubation. It will not be easy as we do not have an existing playbook to follow, but it is with this expressed intent of “bringing people together to do things together” under a shared purpose of collective value creation that we have created ARC.

Today, we are a high-agency, purpose-driven collective. ARC has created a network of 887 builders, investors, operators, and cultural architects that have bonded over our shared highs and lows of being in the crypto space, but also through time and proximity together during events, retreats and more.

Whenever we set out any collective community goals, we are able to rally targeted profiles within the community to come together to achieve those goals. These can range from our referral campaigns for the acquisition of new members, supporting fellow members in the amplification of their project launches and gradually bigger milestones as we start working with new partners or incubated projects (more detail under Pillar #3).

It’s important to call out here that we are able to rally our members together because our motivations and interests are aligned. That is also the core reason why curation was such a huge part of our membership design from the outset. We were looking to build a diverse community but also one where individuals already shared similar values, passions and beliefs about Web3/crypto.

On this note, it’s important to call out here that while SAOs are purpose-driven, their goals can and should change from year to year. As each milestone for the entity is unlocked, there is a need to move past that to articulate new goals that gets the SAO one step closer to its end vision.

As an example, for the first 2 years of ARC, the community was driven towards a singular goal of identifying and bringing in people to form the community itself. Members were key in advocating on the core team’s behalf and recommending peers whom they thought highly of to join this new community.

Since our mint closed last year, we are full steam ahead this year, embarking on the next phase for growth and scale. Similarly, the community will be roped in to contribute towards the next set of goals we have.

To help us achieve our larger goals and long-term vision of being a first-of-its-kind powerhouse for collaboration and incubation, ARC needs to be a commercially viable, self-sustaining entity. It goes without saying that developing stable, recurring revenue streams that can tide us through both bulls and bears is the way to achieve this.

This would be a non-question in any kind of business, crypto being the only exception where projects get to ‘survive’ through the launch of a token and try to use it to replace revenues. Having said that, in the last year especially, participants in the space have had sufficient experience to form a broad consensus that revenue or a clear path to revenue is no longer optional, it is entirely essential.

Notably, we have highlighted this as an important goal and milestone for ARC ahead of the launch of a token (or what we will be positioning as a social currency in the later part of this article).

Historically community Web3 social products like DAOs have not been able to achieve long-term sustainability because they often prioritised social coordination over financial fundamentals. Without a clear path to achieve revenue, these DAOs become reliant on token speculation and treasury grants for revenue that becomes unstable when initial hype and attention has faded.

In that regard, ARC had noted long before that the development of stable revenue streams is non-negotiable. In order to create a thriving SAO that is able to work in a coordinated fashion towards our collective goals, these revenue streams are critical to give us the resources to continue delivering value back to the core community to motivate continuous contributions back to the collective.

In addition, to reward community and ecosystem participants for their contributions, we need a valuable social currency to incentivise these behaviours (to be covered in the next section). Stable revenue streams will put us in a stronger position to back the social currency not just when it launches but also after.

Over the past 2 years, ARC has worked on developing various revenue streams that are at different stages of bearing fruit. These include:

1. Investments: With projects increasingly preferring community-led capital over traditional VCs (with reference to earlier points about how SAOs can aid projects in accelerating growth and scale), ARC facilitates this by leveraging our community’s resources and networks to surface high-potential dealflow.
   Community members who have invested and hence with concrete skin in the game bring stronger post-investment support to projects. And lastly, there’s the “distribution-as-alpha” bonus as projects gain access to a pool of immediate users, not just financial capital.
   Through this, ARC earns allocations via strategic investment and access-driven deals. Moving forward, ARC will be more outbound in this avenue.
2. Incubation & Advisory: We selectively incubate and advise both Web3 projects and Web2 companies that align with ARC’s thesis and can scale with the resources of the community. Community members and their entities who have shown merit are looped in based on their expertise. Our community-led structure helps us scale advisory without bloating headcount. Our selective curation process ensures that projects we incubate or advise, benefit from the expertise and proven track record of highly qualified individuals within our community, leading to greater efficiencies and a higher likelihood of success and value creation.
   Through the ongoing work the core team does with community management and relationship-building with members, we have built an understanding around the profiles, capabilities, experiences and resources of all our members. When potential projects reach out to us, we’re able to easily shortlist and assemble a team of experts that suit the needs of the projects.
   As an example, we have already begun the process of building with our member (who owns the IP), a novel biotech company developing next-gen solutions for gut-driven health and cognitive performance. When this project looks at developing its GTM plan, we could reach out to members in ARC that run marketing agencies to help. If this project requires distribution in both Web3, Web2 and the real world, we can latch on to our members’ immediate and secondary networks with a cumulative social media following of hundreds of millions (adding certain key assets that we have/own brings this number to over 1 billion). If this project launches a token, we can easily deploy the right tokenomics experts to support its needs. Now imagine that we were able to deploy this model of working to every single project we incubate where we are able to bring together the best talent, resources and capital to support and get behind that project or product.
   At the current moment, as we prioritise the intent to create impactful, scalable products, the core team takes the lead in shortlisting and selecting members and the right candidates for different tasks based on merit. However, we imagine that as we scale and grow, we can progressively decentralise this process, improving the speed and effectiveness of how we do it.
   Revenue through this avenue can be earned via tokens, equity or fiat and shared with contributing members who were part of the work that was carried out.
   This will be one of our core revenue streams and we are always eager to explore collaborations with cracked builders, high-agency founders and projects. If you are building something exciting and believe ARC's community and resources could be a valuable asset, please do reach out to myself or any of the core team members of ARC.
3. Node Operations: ARC operates relayer and validator nodes for a selection of networks. We tap on members of the community with technical experience to help run and maintain these nodes and share the rewards with them.
   Earlier this year, ARC was the only non-institutional entity that was announced as one of WalletConnect’s relayer node runners, amidst a short list of fellow industry titans like Consensys and Ledger.
4. New Product Development: This will be our core priority from a revenue perspective in 2025. In the previous chapter, I spoke about creating new products that serve the community first but then going on to appeal to new users by leveraging on community-led growth. With only 887 ARC Stellars, this expansion to bring in new users will be the start of us building out a larger ecosystem of participants for the SAO to succeed and thrive but also to aid in the development of revenue streams for the entity. More information on what we’ve been cooking will be unveiled in the next few months.

At ARC, I often speak about how we’re inspired by Balaji’s work: The Network State. But unlike Balaji’s intent of using that capacity for collective action to crowdfund for physical territories, we use that to collectively create value through launching new brands, products and IPs (for instance, we have discussed with some members the intent to crowdfund the acquisition of a notable Web2 brand).

For us to build out the revenue streams above and for ARC’s vision to succeed in this post COVID digital era; whether that’s securing allocation on the cap tables of leading Web2 and Web3 companies and projects, working with top-tier builders (both individuals and venture-building teams), partnering with foundations and protocols to help build their core products, or collaborating with strong Web2 brands on strategic business ventures, a strong brand value is paramount.

To Increase Brand Value for a SAO like ARC = Community Health + Members Calibre (Quality × Alignment with ARC goals) – Bad Actors (Reputation Risk × Misalignment)

A member’s calibre in this case can be likened to Google’s "raising the bar" model in hiring. The philosophy is based on the idea that each new hire should be better than at least half of the people currently in a similar role—thus literally “raising the bar” for talent and performance across the organisation over time. When applying this to ARC, this is how we look at the curation of our members over time. From a ‘bad actors’ lens, our soulbound token, Fyrian helps us maintain the quality of curation within ARC. All potential members have to go through an application and review process before they can be allowlisted to mint a Fyrian. And even after they have joined, Fyrian is our tool for enforcing the code of conduct within ARC (in serious situations, we have the ability to remove membership access through the burning of Fyrian).

When potential partners in Web2 or Web3 make a decision on who to work with, if given a choice between 2 entities that are similarly resourced, the partner will always choose to work with a stronger brand as it provides an intangible, but highly valuable positive lift for their own branding. This is also a big reason why we have been able to attract a strong slate of partners from the Web2 world like Shangri-La Group, Edition Hotel, The Great Room, Zouk and more.

With such a strong collective of 887 members, you may ask, why do we need to create an organic distribution pool?

Numbers create an exponential power for collective impact.

It is true that with an existing community of members, there’s a lot a SAO can achieve. However, if we are able to harness the strength of the collective to expand its ecosystem and bring in a new pool of participants, that puts it on a whole new level of scale for action and commercial potential.

Crypto projects have typically tried to create a distribution pool of users at TGE via a token campaign. In such situations, incentives between project and users are entirely misaligned and users are merely motivated by the short-term goal of participating in order to farm the token and dump it after. In the end, it becomes a value-extractive exercise (on both parties, the user and the project) that does not create any long-term value since the distribution pool essentially evaporates upon TGE.

On the other hand, our belief is in the creation of an organic distribution pool that gives us the ability to tap into these users on a longer-term basis for the SAO to achieve collective goals.

Instead of ‘forcing’ the participation of users through farming campaigns that are introduced months before a TGE, our intent is to gradually build up this distribution pool through a series of new products, services and brands that ARC as an ecosystem will be launching. With every new product released, we bring in a new pool of users. With every new consumer brand we create, we’re expanding the audiences we’re targeting to widen our appeal and onboard new participants. With the strength of our networks, we’re able to capture attention from both Web3 and Web2 and we’re confident of growing this organic distribution pool progressively over time.

Our thesis is simple: in the age of AI and hyperfinancialisation, ecosystems that are backed by aligned distribution pools and not hype, will endure. ARC is not just expanding our community, we’re building an economy of users who have inherent reasons to be participating stakeholders in our ecosystem.

The idea of social currencies being the evolution of memecoins has been talked about much by the crypto space as of late and primarily @LucaNetz where he defines a social currency as “a tokenised asset that represents value within a specific community, often used to incentivise engagement, reward participation, and strengthen brand or community loyalty.”

Social currencies innovate upon the existing status quo in crypto by blurring the line between status and utility. Unlike pure utility tokens, their value is backed by who holds them, how they’re used, and what they mean within a specific cultural or social context.

In Community-as-a-Brand entities like ARC, this logic is essential:

• Traditional tokens reward output. Social currencies reward presence, alignment, and identity.
• They act as coordination fuel, not just financial lubricant.
• They strengthen brand equity, turning holders into evangelists and stakeholders further achieving the concept of “Community-Led Growth” detailed in the previous chapters of this series.

As shared in our earlier chapters, ARC believes strongly in the philosophy of “giving value to receive value”. As members contribute and help get us closer towards our goals, there is a need to reward these desirable behaviours with the right incentives. Social currencies are an important lever that can achieve this.

At the same time, social currencies with well thought-through tokenomics and hence value can be used to tap on the strength of a larger collective of users beyond our immediate community to achieve our community goals as we outlined in Chapter 2.

This social currency will function as more than just governance, speculation or fees. For the currency to grow and sustain that demand over time, it needs to have emotional value imbued into it and functional value positioned around its utility.

Building Emotional Value Around Social Currencies:

From an emotional perspective, we endeavour for it to turn into a marker of identity and affiliation. In a world where anyone can clone code and build tech, the true moats will eventually be access, culture and distribution.

This social currency will be a way to manifest our philosophy, values and beliefs. In an ecosystem where we seek to propagate our core belief of “giving value to receive value”, contributors to the ecosystem will be the biggest ‘earners’ of the social currency. This helps to build trust, loyalty and legitimacy with stakeholders in the ecosystem, the roots of a social win.

This effect can then be further amplified by creating scarcity to prioritise contributors. As an example, limiting the number of future token drops to contributors who will be bringing value back to the ecosystem.

Generating Functional Value through Purposeful Access and Utility:

Once contributors are rewarded with the social currency they have earned, the next question that comes up is - “where will they get to use it?”. In any sustainable economy, a currency only has meaning if there is a genuine exchange of goods and services. In this case, the currency acts as an intermediary to aid in the exchange.

While we have spent the last 2 years building the foundation for our community and identifying the people that we should bring together. This work is ongoing, community purges are a natural process as members cycle in and out and personal motivations shift over time. But we’ve begun building the ecosystem, one that contributors and participants alike can grow with and benefit from. This could come in the form of new products that holders can pay with the social currency to participate in or exclusive opportunities that contributors can access with the social currency.

Social currencies are the connective tissue between brand and economy, between people and protocol. For ARC, we do not see this social currency as just a financial instrument, but the heartbeat of the SAO that will allow us to achieve social coordination at-scale.

The foundational principle behind such a social currency is that brand love is king. We’re not just trying to create a new memecoin with a better story. We’re building an extension of the ARC brand that has inherent desirability and social value because of all the attributes already created around the ARC brand - the people in the community, the participants in the ecosystem, the partnerships we have established and so on.

Social currencies the way we have envisioned them will enable a large group of diverse but aligned individuals to generate larger-than-size impact as a collective.

The blockchain gave us the ability to distribute and co-share ownership. Trustlessly, transparently and at scale.

Tokens gave us incentives to align user actions.

But it is AI that will give us autonomy and the power to execute on social coordination at scale.

As AI agents become more integrated into DAO operations, a new generation of projects like Eidolabs.xyz are exploring agent-powered grant programmes and even autonomous incubators, where agents not only support projects, but actively decide which of them receive funding. In another example that recently trended on X, a company shared how they were able to achieve $5M in Annual Recurring Revenue with a team of less than 10 employees supported by AI agents.

All this shows great promise on the powers of AI and what it can accomplish. At the same time, we are conscious that due to the nature of how ARC has been designed, we have to take a more grounded, and arguably more human-centric approach.

Ultimately, we believe that especially in the short term, AI agents should enhance human judgment versus replace it.

At ARC, we have started looking into the usage of AI across multiple facets. Some of this work has started while some is still in its early stages. There are 2 key pillars in our AI strategy:

1. Representation

We have always believed that when we add in the ethos of a DAO or the collaborative ethos of Web3 into what we are doing at ARC, we are essentially trying to consolidate all the merits of our members into a single entity. A quintessential founder or creator if you may. The ideas, the expertise, the networks, even our social media following where we relish the idea of a consolidated group of aligned members pushing a singular product.

Our vision is for the ultimate creation of an AI agent that represents this single collective we have created. It will act as a real-time interface to the collective—surface-level knowledge, member capabilities, ARC’s thesis, and decision records are available on demand to collaborators, founders, and partners. (Note that all of this is not possible without a strong foundation of a thriving and aligned community. Not an easy feat, it wasn't easy, it still isn't. But we’re still here.)

Imagine a potential future where this single AI agent could be represented as an X handle, sharing thought leadership as an amalgamation of members’ expertise or being a ‘pseudo co-founder’ of Stellars’ projects by advocating on their behalf.

2. Internal Community Automation

At the same time, for us to multiply the impact of the collective, we have to tap on AI to aid the core team. These are some of the ways in which AI can help:

• Assessment of incoming dealflows (e.g. investments, incubation and advisory) to research, do due diligence, highlight and prioritise the ones that should get the greatest attention for final decision-making from the core team and members of community
• Social media content creation and amplification (we have already launched the MVP of this with @arcintern)
• Community management operations to help members with onboarding, navigating community culture e.g. informational channels, events, code of conduct or even workflows related to ‘working together as a community’ where members can be roped in as contributors to complete tasks
• Elevating members’ community experience through initiatives like member-matching to connect them with fellow members based on needs and priorities, gathering feedback and surfacing insights on what can be done better
• Streamlining governance-related workflows to reduce the workload of the core team. These can include moderation support in members’ conversations, sentiment detection to flag any potential conflicts, the running of polls/surveys to gather consensus for future initiatives, or even helping with the evaluation of community suggestions and proposals.
• Contributions & Reputation Tracking where we can tap on AI to note a variety of contributions from members to formulate a scoring system and reward as well as recognise members accordingly

With the above, ARC is charting a new path towards how we approach and execute AI:

We do not see ARC transforming into a fully autonomous AI-powered DAO, nor do we imagine ARC to be a 100% founder or core-team reliant centralised structure.

The truth, as they say, lies somewhere in between.

ARC will use AI agents to scale context, automate process, and increase throughput, while preserving human judgment where it matters most. The result?

A community-as-a-brand entity that can operate like a commercial entity, but stronger.

A social currency-powered institution that executes faster, scales reputation fairly, and minimises human bottlenecks. Yet retaining the core advantages of human-powered decision-making that AI is unable to replace efficiently at the current status quo.

Web2 Community Infra = Platforms (Telegram, Discord, Slack)

Web3 Community Infra = Protocols + Tokens (gated access, rewards)

How will all this be designed for long-term resilience?

As we head into an increasingly VUCA world, companies will increasingly be tested against their ability to shift, adapt and evolve. Not just at an individual employee level, but at an organisational level. The strongest winners will be the ones who are able to mobilise individuals within the entity collectively to take action as a single entity.

Whether we’re talking about making the most of a bull or pivoting and deploying a different set of strategies for the bear, SAOs’ ability to solve for social coordination at-scale towards the achievement of collective goals will position them in a place for the greatest impact.

We opened this new chapter by outlining ARC’s ambition to solve the problem of social coordination at-scale. To realise our bigger vision of bringing people together to do things together, and specifically to achieve our community goals, this isn’t just a typical problem statement but an existential one.

SAOs (socially autonomous organisations) is the solution for this problem. Through the 5 pillars outlined, SAOs can help to achieve collective goals through the actions of aligned individuals and critically and be a highly-valuable partner to founders and projects by accelerating their GTMs through the aggregation of financial, social and knowledge capital in one entity.

The 5 pillars we outlined for creating and building thriving SAOs include:

1. Born from a community that is purpose-driven
2. Sustained through stable revenue streams
3. Scaled with an organic distribution pool of users in Web3 and the real world
4. Coordinated with a social currency
5. Powered by AI and designed for long-term resilience

ARC is in the stages of building out these 5 pillars with a big focus on Pillars 2 and 3 in 2025. As we enter a period of positive momentum in the market, we hope to be in a good position to tap on the strength of the community and the work of the core team to expand the ecosystem and bring on new participants.

It is my belief that the digital institutions of the future will not see their beginnings in a  boardroom. Instead, they will have their seeds sowed within a group of individuals in an app or a group chat. They will be powered by AI, coordinated with a social currency, driven by purpose-aligned individuals and ultimately, shaped and borne from a community like ARC.

We are building a first-of-its-kind powerhouse for collaboration and incubation. With the backing of 887 ARC Stellars behind us, a diverse collective made up of Asia’s top Web3 builders and investors, owners of brand IPs with a global reach, online influencers and personalities that have the attention of the general public across Web3 and Web2, ARC has everything it takes to establish itself as one of Asia’s most dominant digital institutions.