What Arc is, and what it is not

Arc is a Layer-1 blockchain built by Circle, the company behind USDC, and designed around one use: moving stablecoins between businesses. That focus is the whole story. It explains the design choices, the kinds of companies showing up early, and why most of what you read about Arc is still an announcement rather than a shipped product.

Gas is paid in USDC

On most chains you hold a volatile network token to pay fees. On Arc, fees are denominated in USDC. For a payments company this removes an entire operational problem: no treasury desk buying gas tokens, no fee line that changes value between quote and settlement, no reconciliation of a second asset.

It also removes the thing most crypto directories are built to track. There is no Arc token to price, no airdrop to farm, and nothing to buy. Any site selling an "ARC token" is a lookalike, and we flag those.

A permissioned validator set at the start

Arc launches with a named set of founding validators rather than open participation. These are institutions Circle has publicly identified. Operating a validator is a real commitment, and we record it — but as a mark on an entry, not as a role. A bank running a validator has not necessarily shipped a product, and we will not let the mark imply otherwise.

What mainnet on 16 September 2026 changes

Before mainnet, everything on Arc is testnet work or intent. Testnet work is real engineering and worth recording, but it is not customers moving money. Mainnet is the line where a claim can be checked against activity.

Our statuses are built around that line:

• Live — we observed the product working for real customers.
• Testnet — the flow works on Arc testnet only, with no live customer money.
• Announced — an intention has been stated, with nothing deployed or shipped that we can see.
• Inactive — no observed activity when we last looked.

Every one of those carries a source and the date we checked, because a status without a date is a rumour.

The four things companies actually do with Arc

Directories usually sort by product category. That hides the more useful question: what is this company's relationship to the chain? We record one primary role per entry.

A company that deploys runs its own contracts on Arc. One that integrates connects Arc to a product that already exists — a payment processor adding an Arc settlement path, for example. One that issues puts an asset on the chain. One that serves provides infrastructure that other Arc projects depend on: RPC, indexing, oracles, custody, compliance.

Those roles determine what we can even check. On-chain checks such as contract verification or a reserve attestation only make sense for projects that deploy or issue. We do not show them for integrators or service providers, because an absent check is not a failing grade.

What Arc is not

Arc is not a general-purpose smart contract playground, and it is not trying to be. It is not a consumer chain. It is not a token launch. And, for the avoidance of doubt, this directory is not Circle: we have no affiliation with the company, and nothing here is an endorsement or investment advice.

If you want the fastest read on where things actually stand, skip the announcements and look at what is live.