If we're being all prophetic, here's my prophecy:
Arx will be earnable in-game, but the activities required to earn arx will be skewed towards the new player experience, which is also getting a revamp this update. This will encourage new players to use those arx on paintjobs for their intro-level ships which, let's face it, have a vast array of paintjobs etc. that almost no-one ever buys because almost no-one ever keeps those ships long enough to get emotionally attached to them enough to want to buy a paintjob.
So, new commanders be like: "Congratulations! You docked without exploding! Here, have an arx."
Old commanders be like: "Congratulations! You just docked for the 1,000,000th time! No soup for you. Oh, you want an arx? Then go find 100 undiscovered Earth-like planets."