Funds that wait a month
In the bank, a fund was allowed to be slow. Monthly dealing. Notice periods. A NAV that someone calculated and someone else checked. If you wanted out, you waited. That was not a bug. It was how the thing was built, because the assets inside were not cash.
On-chain, the default assumption is the opposite. If it is a token, it should trade now, sit in a pool, get used as collateral, get liquidated by a bot that does not know your name. That assumption holds for stablecoins and for things that are already like cash. It does not hold for a strategy that marks once a month.
I used to keep a private map of TradFi jobs and their crypto cousins: custodian, transfer agent, fund admin, prime broker, clearinghouse. Some of the cousins are real. Uniswap is an exchange in the way that matters. Aave is a lending desk with worse manners. A lot of the map is a pun. Calling a smart contract a transfer agent does not make Computershare nervous.
The hole I keep staring at is the slow fund. Tokenising it is easy to announce and hard to finish. You can put a wrapper on chain and still have a thing that cannot be sold at 4pm, cannot be seized cleanly, and cannot be priced between NAVs without someone inventing a number. DeFi protocols that assume instant exit will treat that wrapper as a problem, or they will ignore it.
Aarc is my attempt to work on that hole, starting with Bitcoin yield that has a real fund behind it. I will not pretend the problem is solved. I will not put fund terms on this page. I will say that I only noticed the hole because I had sat in the slow world first. People who have only known AMMs keep asking why anyone would buy an asset that cannot exit today. People who have only known funds keep asking why anyone would let a bot sell their position.
Both questions are fair. The work, if there is any, is in the boring middle: when can you leave, who calculates the number, what happens when too many people want out on the same day. I have seen that movie with spreadsheets. I am trying to see whether it can be played with a token without lying about the speed.