Arc Chain, in Numbers: One Dollar, Two Decimals, and 97,000 Tokens in a Day

Originally published on xroot.dev. Circle opened Arc's public mainnet on 16 September 2026. Four days later I read it the way I read every new chain — from its own node, with eth_call, ignoring the launch posts. Six numbers came back that the launch posts do not carry, and two of them will bite anyone who integrates the chain from a table instead of a query. The headline facts hold up: an EVM layer 1 whose native coin is USDC, blocks every half second, deterministic finality, and a validator set of twelve named institutions — Circle plus BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, ICE and six more — running proof of authority. Everything that follows is what the chain itself says, read on 20 September at block 21,767,062, with the call that produced each figure so you can run it again. Ground Truth in Four Calls A chain id gets transcribed wrong, an RPC URL goes stale, and "mainnet is live" means at least four different things. So: ask the node. RPC=https://rpc.mainnet.arc.io call() { curl -s $RPC -H 'content-type: application/json' -d "$1"; } call '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"eth_chainId","params":[]}' # -> 0x13b2 = 5042 call '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"web3_clientVersion","params":[]}' # -> "arc/v1" (a Reth-based client under a Malachite BFT consensus) call '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"eth_getBlockByNumber","params":["latest",false]}' # -> gasLimit 0x1c9c380 = 30,000,000 · gasUsed 213,828 · 4 transactions # baseFeePerGas 0x4a817c800 = 20 gwei · extraData 0x00000004a817c800 call '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"eth_getCode","params":["0x000000000000000000000000000000000000006b","latest"]}' # -> 0x (no Arbitrum precompile: this is not a Nitro chain) Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Chain ID — 5042 (0x13b2) Stack — Malachite BFT + Reth · Osaka EVM · L1 Block — ~0.5 s · 30M gas · 3–11% used Gas coin — USDC · base fee pinned at 20 gwei The last line of the block header is the interesting one. extraData is eight bytes, and it equals the base fee: Arc publishes the next block's base fee in the parent header. That is a fee market telling you its answer before you ask, and it is the subject of section three. Multicall3, Permit2, the CREATE2 deterministic deployer and Safe v1.4.1 are all present at their canonical addresses. The MetaMask, Alchemy and Uniswap EIP-7702 delegator contracts hold code too; the docs put the EVM at the Osaka fork, which is what makes delegating to them possible. One Dollar, Two Decimals USDC is the native coin. That sentence hides a detail every integrator will trip on once: the node counts it in 18 decimals, and the ERC-20 contract that represents the same coin counts it in 6. Same balance, two scales, a factor of a trillion apart. POOL=0x8366a39cc670b4001a1121b8f6a443a643e40951 # Uniswap v4 PoolManager USDC=0x3600000000000000000000000000000000000000 # the ERC-20 face of the native coin BLOCK=0x14c2602 # pin both reads to one block # The native balance, as the node counts it: 18 decimals eth_getBalance($POOL, $BLOCK) # -> 3,692,022,800,475,000,000,000 wei-equivalent # ÷ 1e12 = 3,692,022,800,475 # The ERC-20 balance, as the contract counts it: 6 decimals eth_call({ to: $USDC, data: balanceOf($POOL) }, $BLOCK) # -> 3,692,022,800,475 # = $3,692,022.800475 # decimals() on the face -> 6 · symbol() -> "USDC" · name() -> "USDC" Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode At the same block the two numbers agree to the unit, so this is one balance with two interfaces, not a coin and a wrapper. The contract at 0x3600…0000 also emits Transfer events for native movements — four of them in the block I pinned — which is EIP-7708 in practice: a history indexer that reads native sends and those logs counts every transfer twice. nativeCurrency.decimals: 18 is chain precision, not display precision. A wallet that adds the network from the standard parameters and trusts the decimals field will show a one-dollar balance as 0.000000000001. Arc's own wallet guide says to divide by 10¹², label the result USDC rather than ETH, and merge the native and ERC-20 rows into one — and the network-parameters page warns that a wallet without custom-gas-token support "may display balances as ETH". One more read on that contract, because it is where Circle's controls would live if they lived in code. The ERC-20 face is 1,798 bytes, is not a proxy (the EIP-1967 implementation slot is empty), and its bytecode contains none of the selectors the mainnet USDC contract is known for — blacklist, isBlacklisted, pause, mint. That does not mean there is no freeze on Arc; it means the freeze, if it exists, is not in this contract. The honest reading stops there. A Fee Floor, Not a Fee Market eth_feeHistory over the last blocks returns the same base fee six times: 20 gwei, with utilisation between three and eleven percent. Arc's fee model is EIP-1559 with a moving average on top and a hard floor — 20 gwei in the docs, and 20 gwei in every block I sampled — so under normal load the base fee never moves. It sits on the floor. The node's suggested price was 22.0 gwei, of which 2.0 was tip. Now do the unit conversion nobody does. The native coin is a dollar, and one gwei is 10⁻⁹ of it. So a gas unit costs two hundredths of a millionth of a cent, and at the 22.0 gwei the node suggested that morning: Plain transfer · 21,000 gas — $0.00046 ERC-20 transfer · ~65,000 gas — $0.0014 Uniswap v4 fee claim · ~250,000 gas — $0.0055 Token deployment · ~2,000,000 gas — $0.044 Two things follow. First, a fee quote on this chain is a solved problem: the price is pinned, denominated in dollars, and needs no oracle — the number on screen is the number, every time. Second, gas cannot be anyone's business model here, including the chain's. At 1.5 million transactions a day and a typical cost under a tenth of a cent, the network's whole daily gas take is on the order of a thousand dollars (an estimate from those two figures, not a measurement). Whatever pays for twelve SOC 2 validators, it is not the fee floor. The Wrapped Token That Only Reverts Every Uniswap deployment carries a WETH9 address — the wrapped native coin the routers and position managers use when a pool holds ETH. Ask Arc's v4 PositionManager for it and you get an answer. Ask the answer anything and you get a revert: PM=0x6049c9a0e26405c0985f9e3685c87d0ae917f82b # Uniswap v4 PositionManager eth_call({ to: PM, data: WETH9() }) # -> 0x8bceaa40b9acdfaedf85adf4ff01f5ad6517937f eth_getCode(0x8bceaa40…937f) # -> 53 bytes: # 6080604052 348015600e575f5ffd5b50 ; standard prologue, no value # 60405163 ea3559ef 60e01b 8152 6004 01 ; PUSH4 0xea3559ef … REVERT # …fd eth_call({ to: 0x8bceaa40…937f, data: name() }) -> revert 0xea3559ef eth_call({ to: 0x8bceaa40…937f, data: symbol() }) -> revert 0xea3559ef eth_call({ to: 0x8bceaa40…937f, data: decimals() }) -> revert 0xea3559ef Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode That is not a squatter and not a bug. Uniswap's own deployment table for chain 5042 lists the address as "Unsupported Protocol (WETH9)": a 53-byte contract whose only behaviour is to revert with one custom error, deployed on purpose so that every code path expecting a wrapper fails loudly instead of silently. On Arc there is nothing to wrap — the native coin already has an ERC-20 face at 0x3600…0000. Any "wrap" or "unwrap" button, any router path that hops through WETH, any collect-and-compound flow that calls deposit() — all of it dies here, and it dies with a selector you can grep for. The squatter is elsewhere, and it is the same one I found on Robinhood Chain in August. Uniswap v3's canonical mainnet addresses — 0x1F98…F984 for the factory, 0xC364…FE88 for the position manager — both hold a 2,747-byte contract on Arc that is not Uniswap v3. feeAmountTickSpacing(3000) returns nothing. The real v3 factory is at 0xf0db…3918 and answers 60, and its position manager at 0x3965…1377 points back to it. A tool that copies v3 addresses from a table it trusts would be reading a stranger's contract and calling it Uniswap. Read the code, make one live call, then believe the address. Who Got There First Arc was built, in Circle's words, for payments, FX, tokenised assets and institutional markets. The explorer's daily transaction chart says who actually showed up: 12–15 September, private mainnet: 126K · 131K · 407K · 456K transactions a day. 16 September, public launch: 7,763,670 transactions. Reporters counted 97,025 new tokens that day, more than 83,000 of them through one launchpad, and $410.8M of trading with about 82% from memecoin launchpads. 17 · 18 · 19 September: 5,472,100 · 2,611,050 · 1,551,810. Down 80% from the launch day in three days. The DEX numbers from DefiLlama on 20 September: $52.8M in the last day, of which Uniswap v4 is $36.8M and v3 $14.4M — 97% between them. The v4 PositionManager's nextTokenId reads 222,177, so 222,176 v4 positions have been minted so far; the v3 manager's totalSupply is 36,325. Total protocol fees on the chain, all sources, were $375K in the same day. For scale, Robinhood Chain booked roughly forty-five times that on the day I measured it in early September. The explorer counts 1,316,279 contracts on the chain and 19,380 verified ones — one in sixty-eight. And the trending list on the pool indexer, the morning I looked, had this in it: USDC / USDC 1% — $1.16M traded in 24 hours, $386K in reserve, on a launchpad's own exchange. A token that calls itself USDC, paired against the real one. On Arc exactly one address is USDC: 0x3600…0000. EURC is one address. USYC is one address. A ticker is a string anyone can type into a constructor; the address is the only thing a copy cannot have. GoPlus was already warning about clones of two of the chain's biggest launch tokens by the second day. I do not read the decay as a verdict. A launch-day spike that falls 80% is the shape of every launch; the question is where the line flattens, and four days do not answer it. What the numbers do say is that the population using Arc today is the one that uses every new EVM chain in its first week — launching, trading and copying tokens — and it arrived before the institutional use the chain was named for. A Token That Exists and Is Not Launched, and Who Runs the Chain On launch day Circle announced a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens — and, in the same breath, that they are not available to the public and that the mint is "a technical milestone, not a commitment to launch". The whitepaper post on arc.io still carries the line that any token "is merely exploratory". Gas stays in USDC. A move to proof of stake, where the token would have a job, is described as something Circle is exploring for 2027. So: the token exists on-chain and has no holders you can become. Anything trading under that ticker today, and anything offering an "ARC airdrop" or an "ARC claim", is not Circle's. Search interest in "arc token" hit its peak on launch day, which is exactly the audience those pages are built for. Who runs the chain is disclosed more plainly than most. Twelve named institutions run proof of authority; a block is final when more than two thirds of them pre-commit to it; Circle chose them. Arc's security page says that "validator-layer sanctions controls are part of Arc's network operating model" and names a third-party monitoring provider. On Robinhood Chain I could count how often the filtering switch had been used, because Nitro exposes the filterer as a precompile with a public nonce. Arc is not Nitro and has no such artefact, so whether the switch has been thrown is not something the chain will tell you. I record that as an unknown, not as an absence. What to Carry Out of This Decimals come from the asset, never from the chain. Read decimals() on the ERC-20 face and treat native units as 18; divide by 10¹² to show dollars. The two are one balance. There is no WETH. The address Uniswap points at reverts by design. Delete the wrap path; it has nothing to wrap. Canonical addresses are not addresses. The v3 factory is not where the tables say. Check code size and make one call the real contract must answer before you label anything. The name is not the coin. One address is USDC. Anything else wearing the ticker is a copy, and the first week's trending list already had one. Free tool Is that token what it says it is? The token audit reads a contract's owner levers, hidden spenders, holders and liquidity straight from the chain — public data, no wallet connect, nothing to sign — and on Robinhood Chain checks a stock token against its issuer's own registry, so a copy is named as a copy. Solana and Robinhood Chain today. Run a token audit Read the Source Yourself Every on-chain figure above came from the public endpoint https://rpc.mainnet.arc.io, the chain's Blockscout explorer and its /api/v2/stats, and DefiLlama, all read on 20 September 2026. Reference: Arc network parameters, the fee model, Arc's wallet integration guide, Uniswap's deployment table for chain 5042, Arc's security page, and Circle's launch release. The launch-day token and volume counts are reporters' figures (BeInCrypto, CryptoRank, 17 September), not mine; the GoPlus warning was carried by KuCoin's news feed the same day. Re-run every call before relying on any of it — this chain is four days old. xroot.dev is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Circle Internet Group, Inc. "Arc", "USDC" and "EURC" are used here only to name the public blockchain and the assets this article examines. Nothing here is financial advice.