Circle's Arc is a new blockchain that charges gas in USDC, not ETH. Here's what Arc is, who's building on it (like BlackRock and Visa), and how to bridge in.
Arc is a new layer-1 blockchain from Circle, the company behind USDC (USDC). Its public mainnet opened on Sept. 16. It is EVM-compatible, so your existing wallet works, and it settles in under a second.
The gas is the part that trips people up. There is no Ethereum (ETH) and no separate fee token. You pay in USDC, which changes how you fund a wallet and which tools work on day one.
Arc's launch post set out the design: USDC as native gas, sub-second finality, EVM compatibility, and institutional validators.
How Does Arc Charge Gas? In USDC, Not ETH
On most chains, you need two assets: one you hold and one you burn to move it. Arc collapses those into a single asset; the USDC you bridge in is the USDC you spend on fees. Circle targets a base fee near $0.01 per transaction, priced in dollars instead of floating with a volatile token.
To add it manually, the parameters are:
Chain ID: 5042
Currency symbol: USDC
Circle provides its own explorer, and Etherscan just added support for the chain.
One thing to keep in mind: Arc exposes USDC twice. As the native gas asset, it uses 18 decimals, and as an ERC-20 asset, it uses six. Circle tells wallets to show a single USDC row and divide the 18-decimal figure by 10^12.
If a wallet shows a balance a trillion times too large, or labels it "ETH," that's why. Most wallets will roll out a fix eventually.
Why People Paid Up to $1.85 per USDC to Get on Arc Early
Before launch, the only way onto Arc was to buy USDC from someone already there. A marketplace called Unstable matched Ethereum USDC against Arc-side USDC at a 3% taker fee.
Offers sat around 20% over par on Sept. 7, roughly $1.20 for a dollar, and reached 1.82x to 1.85x by Sept. 13. A Sept. 15 report counted 11,660 conversions worth over $5 million.
Those were thin, seller-quoted offers, not a market price. USDC did not depeg. People bid up scarce access.
Nick Research, an account that ranked every Arc launchpad three days before mainnet, spelled out what buyers were accepting for that access.
Put simply, nobody was actually speculating on USDC. They were buying the capability to act on day one.
Two things drove that. One was meme coin positioning: after Robinhood Chain tokens ran hard on launch, people wanted to be ready to trade immediately. The other was airdrop speculation. Circle raised $222 million in an Arc token presale in May 2026 at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation.
Of a 10 billion supply, 60% is allocated to "network participants." Circle hasn’t published a snapshot or eligibility criteria, and there’s no public token launch date yet. That 60% line is the entire basis for the theory.
Anyone who paid 1.85x is now down 46% on the currency alone, since it’s now free to bridge to Arc. Any site offering to check your "Arc airdrop eligibility" is likely a scam at this point.
Who's on Arc? BlackRock, Visa, and 190+ Institutions
Arc launched with a permissioned founding validator cohort including BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, ICE, Standard Chartered and Galaxy.
BlackRock's head of digital assets, Robert Mitchnick, called Arc a rail that can "support faster settlement, improved collateral mobility, and broader institutional adoption."
Circle counts more than 190 institutional and ecosystem builders on Arc. The Arc.io partner page names about 99, including HSBC, Deutsche Bank, BNY, Fireblocks, Copper, MetaMask and Ledger. Many are committed rather than live, so check before assuming anything is already up and running.
Source: DefiLlama
DeFi arrived fully formed. Arc passed $300 million of total value locked (TVL) within hours of opening, most of it lending on Morpho Blue and Aave V4.
The retail layer is noisier: the directory ArcLens lists 213 projects, most of them days old, with roughly 30 being launchpads chasing early liquidity.
The most popular newer projects on the chain lag dramatically behind the incumbents.
How to Use Arc: Bridge In, Then 3 Things to Try
Now that Arc is live, getting on the chain is a relatively simple task that starts with picking a bridge. CCTP is a popular choice, as is the official Circle USDC bridge.
Whichever route you pick, send 1 to 5 USDC to test first, and stick to official domains. Look-alike "Arc bridge" sites are already charging 0.5% to 4%.
If you already have USDC on a CEX, OKX, Kraken, and Gate have opened both deposits and withdrawals on Arc. Binance, Bybit, KuCoin, and MEXC have deposits open, with withdrawals gated on liquidity. Coinbase hasn't added Arc yet.
The network may be labeled Arc, Arc network, or Arc (ARC) depending on the venue, so check the selector before you send.
What you can test now:
Speculate on new tokens through a bot. Argos Bot is Arc-native and runs on X, Telegram, and web. Based Bot arrived with Arc support on day one and features an integrated bridge/cross-chain swap feature. Both are trading venues rather than on-ramps, so fund an Arc address first. This is the meme-coin end of Arc, so trade with caution.
Supply liquidity to a DEX. Volume reaches a new chain before liquidity does, which is why early fee yields look absurd and never hold. Arc opened turning over about as much DEX volume as it had liquidity, roughly $27.9 million against $25.3 million on Uniswap, with around $226,000 paid in fees.
Take a position on a launchpad. Flutchfun, NebulaPad, and Lunya are currently the busiest, running USDC-denominated bonding curves that graduate into a DEX pool at a set market cap. But the landscape is evolving quickly; new players are launching by the hour, and it will take time until a clear leader is crowned.
Arc is a settlement network institutions built for payments and FX, and a meme coin casino opened on it the same afternoon. Keep separate wallets for interacting with the two aspects of the chain.
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