Circle’s Arc blockchain processed 7.83 million transactions in its first 24 hours after launching on Wednesday with BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard and eight other institutions as founding validators, but lifetime transfers of USDC, its intended payments asset, stood at only about 624,000, according to Arc’s own block explorer. Roughly 400,000 new accounts appeared on day one, and more than 73,000 contracts were deployed.
Almost none of that activity was the institutional settlement chief executive Jeremy Allaire had promoted at launch. Memecoins filled the blocks instead, pushing day-one decentralised exchange volume to around $82 million and average fees up fourfold, to three cents. Traders piled into tokens such as TOLLY, LONG and COOL, all down between 56% and 77% from their launch-day highs within hours, prompting one trader to post on X that the chain was “cooked” after one day.
Circle’s own staff added to the mess. Rachel Mayer, the company’s vice president of product for Arc, posted an AI-generated image promoting a memecoin called DUKE, calling it a tribute to Allaire’s dog, drawing roughly a million views and accusations that Circle was shilling tokens to bootstrap its own network. Arc’s second- and third-largest tokens by value turned out to be Circle’s own cirBTC and EURC, which at least kept the irony contained to products the company controls.
The pattern is not unique to Arc. Robinhood Chain saw a similar memecoin scramble at its July launch, doing $878 million in day-one volume against an institutional pitch nobody tested. Arc’s blocks process in half a second with no congestion, so the technology works as designed. Whether real payment volume ever arrives, or Circle built a very fast casino, is the question its eleven validators signed up for but cannot yet answer.
