A man with a calculator where most people keep their adrenaline
Most of crypto sells the rush. Nicolás Jaramillo sells the opposite. His company, Arch, takes the wildest corner of finance and files it down into something that behaves like an index fund - rated, audited, and dull on purpose.
The ambition is stated plainly and without blushing: be "the BlackRock of web3." It is a strange sentence to say out loud. BlackRock is the largest, most conservative money manager on the planet. Web3 is the place people go to lose their savings on a cartoon frog. Jaramillo's bet is that those two worlds are about to collide, and that whoever brings the discipline of the first to the chaos of the second gets to build something enormous.
He noticed a gap that everyone in crypto walked past. Less than one percent of capital invested in crypto sat in anything resembling an ETF. The products that did exist were, in the words of his co-founder, "unfriendly for inexperienced clients." That is the polite version. The honest version is that buying a diversified basket of digital assets in 2021 meant juggling a dozen wallets, a tab full of protocols, and a faint sense of dread. Arch turns that into a single token.
The reference point he reaches for is telling. He does not compare Arch to a hedge fund or a trading desk. He compares it to BlackRock and to Fintual, the index-fund manager that taught a generation of Chileans to buy a diversified basket and leave it alone. That is the lineage he is claiming - not the casino, the savings account. It is a quieter ambition than most crypto founders allow themselves, and a far larger one.
Figures drawn from company interviews and the July 2022 seed announcement.
We saw an opportunity to create investment products similar to traditional markets.- Nicolás Jaramillo, on why Arch exists
The company that started as something else entirely
Arch was not the plan. The plan was a credit startup called Smash. Jaramillo and his co-founders Christopher Storaker and Diego Larraín did what good operators do when reality disagrees with the roadmap: they listened to users. The research kept pointing somewhere unexpected. People did not want another way to borrow. They wanted a sane way to invest in crypto. So the team pivoted, kept the talent, and pointed it at a bigger problem.
The three of them were not strangers. They had built together before, on MACH - the Bci-owned digital account that became one of the first banking apps ordinary Chileans actually carried around. MACH crossed a million users in its first year. When founders who have already shipped something at that scale reunite, you pay attention. Arch is what happened when they did.
The product line reflects a deeply un-crypto instinct: pick your temperament, not your token. You do not arrive at Arch and start gambling. You answer for your risk appetite first. It is the logic of a financial advisor smuggled into a market that usually treats caution as a personality flaw. The fastest way to understand Arch is to notice what it refuses to do: it will not hand a first-timer a single volatile coin and call that a strategy.
Arch's three portfolio temperaments - low, medium, and high volatility. Bars illustrate relative risk appetite, not returns.
Two flagship baskets, no cartoon frogs
Where most of the market hands you a single coin and wishes you luck, Arch hands you a curated index. Two of its flagships read like a who's who of the assets that survived the noise.
Arch Blockchains
Arch Ethereum Web3
Audits are not an afterthought here - they are the product. Jaramillo treats third-party reviews of the code as a trust feature, proof to a nervous customer that the software does exactly what it claims. In an industry that has burned a lot of people, "boring and verifiable" is a competitive advantage.
Labeling cryptocurrencies as securities would kill innovation - like regulating Uber as a taxi.- On the regulation debate
Ownership, not just access
Ask him to explain web3 and he skips the jargon. "Web 2.0 lets us consume and create content," he says. "Blockchain enables ownership of that content." That is the whole thesis in two sentences - the shift from renting your digital life from Instagram and Amazon to actually holding a deed to it.
He is no anarchist about it. His public posture on regulation is almost unfashionably reasonable: he wants more clarity, not less oversight. His worry is that regulators reach for the nearest old rulebook and crush something new before it can prove itself - the Uber-as-a-taxi mistake, applied to money. It is the position of someone who has spent his career inside regulated finance and respects what the guardrails are for, even while building outside them.
That stance traces back to his training. He is a civil industrial engineer from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, with an MBA from IESE and a leadership program from Georgetown stacked on top. Engineers tend to like systems that are legible. Arch is, in a sense, an engineer's revenge on a market that prefers vibes to spreadsheets.
He is also careful to draw a line he will not cross. Arch educates; it does not whisper hot tips into individual ears. The company leans on teaching people how to think about risk rather than telling any one client what to buy. For a market that runs on influencers and confident strangers, choosing to democratize the framework instead of selling the prediction is its own kind of statement.
He keeps building the rails Latin America didn't have
Look across the resume and a habit emerges. MACH gave Chileans a digital wallet when banks were not interested. Global66 moved money across seven Latin American countries when remittances were slow and expensive - and under his watch as CEO, its monthly users, transactions, and dollar volume all grew roughly tenfold in a single year. Arch is the same instinct aimed at a newer gap: ordinary people who want exposure to digital assets without the casino.
There is also a civic streak that rarely shows up on a crypto founder's bio. He has served as executive director of Política Stereo, a Chilean NGO focused on youth civic engagement, and as president of CreceChile, an entrepreneurship organization. The thread connecting all of it is access - who gets to participate, and who gets left at the door.
His team for this latest act is distributed across the United States and Latin America, run out of Brooklyn with roots firmly in Santiago. The photo at the top of this page is not an accident: the Manhattan skyline sits behind him while he points his company at the same prize from a different shore.
Why anyone wrote the checks
The $5M seed round Arch closed in July 2022 is worth reading as a sentence rather than a number. Upload Ventures, the early-stage spin-off from SoftBank, led it. Digital Currency Group, one of the most established names in the space, came in alongside. So did Soma Capital, Genesis Block Ventures, Ripio Ventures, Devlabs, and the accelerator Techstars. That is a roster that does not chase memes. It chases infrastructure.
What they bought into was timing. The thesis only works if two trends keep moving toward each other: regulators slowly granting crypto a clearer legal shape, and ordinary investors slowly deciding that digital assets belong somewhere in a portfolio. Jaramillo is positioning Arch in the exact spot where those two lines cross. If they never meet, the company is early to a party that does not happen. If they do, he owns the doorway.
It is a high-conviction bet placed by a low-drama operator, which is precisely the combination that tends to age well. He has done the unglamorous version of this before - building the plumbing of finance in markets that lacked it, and growing the numbers quietly while louder companies flamed out. Arch is the same playbook, run on harder terrain. The difference this time is that the prize is not a single country's wallets but the savings habits of an entire emerging asset class.
Web 2.0 lets us consume and create content; blockchain enables ownership of that content.- On what web3 actually changes