Arc Chain Goes Silent After 5 Days Post Mainnet Launch, Launchpads Earn Less Than $1

Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author | Wenser ( @wenser2010 )

Less than a week after its mainnet launch on September 16, the hype around Arc Chain has rapidly cooled, and the major launch platforms that were highly anticipated before the launch are now facing operational difficulties.

According to data from DefiLlama, several Meme Launchpads on Arc Chain have generated less than $200 in protocol revenue in the last 24 hours: Solon earned only $503, while ARK Launch and Tolly earned $180 and $171 respectively. Wonk Fun and AKA earned $69.6 and $66.87 respectively; UBI.fun, Sashimi.fun, and CircleWarp all earned less than $1, and several other Launchpads have yet to generate any revenue.

By forcibly mimicking the development path of Robinhood Chain, Arc Chain has encountered its moment of failure. Looking back at the recent explosive rise and rapid decline of Arc Chain, it can only be said that all of this was foreseen.

A Week for Arc Chain: "Indian Team" Controversy, "$10,000 Small Incentive", "AI Agent Payment Positioning"

For Arc Chain, backed by Circle, a major stablecoin issuer, the past week has not been particularly smooth.

Although many crypto-native projects flocked to Arc Chain just before the mainnet launch, they were more interested in grabbing their share of the market and users rather than injecting their existing user base and liquidity into the Arc ecosystem. This is evident from the numerous partners who spoke extensively about "providing support" and "integrating access" while avoiding discussions about corresponding incentives or actual actions.

Specifically, the issues faced by Arc Chain are not just about early incentives but are accompanied by a series of market controversies and marketing blunders.

First, the "Indian Team" controversy from Arc Chain's online meeting.

On the first day of the launch, a screenshot of an online meeting circulated widely in the crypto community, showing several members who appeared to be of Indian and African descent, leading many to mistakenly believe this was an online meeting of the Arc Chain team, even sparking outrageous claims that "Arc Chain is actually an Indian project." As a result of this news, the meme tokens on Arc Chain experienced a significant drop, with crypto KOL Him stating, "The live stream of Arc Chain looks scarier than the Fed's FOMC meeting."

However, the reality is that this meeting screenshot was merely an online appearance by developers in the Arc Chain ecosystem, and most participants were not official members of the Arc Chain team, including the prominent Indian figure who is actually the founder of the project @Xylonet_ on Arc Chain. It can only be said that rumors spread faster than the truth, and in a crypto space that values "white backgrounds," this rumor quickly damaged the carefully crafted technical image of Arc Chain.

Second, the controversy over Arc Chain's official "$10,000 small incentive".

On September 17, the day after the mainnet launch, Arc officially announced a small funding program. It stated: "The program will provide 20 grants of 500 USDC each to qualified early developers who launch functional Mini Apps on the Arc mainnet, totaling 10,000 USDC, covering early projects, prototypes, and proof-of-concept applications." Yes, you read that right, it is not $100,000, nor $1 million, but $10,000. Looking at this figure alone, it is hard to imagine that this is an incentive activity launched by an L1 public chain that is highly favored by Wall Street and has raised hundreds of millions.

Although Arc had previously released an announcement about a "up to $1 million ecosystem builder incentive," compared to that, this $10,000 small incentive was still shocking to the market—it's hard to understand why the Arc Chain official team would do this at a time when they most needed to "reward brave individuals under heavy rewards" right after the launch.

Third, the controversy over "AI Agent payment positioning."

On the day of the mainnet launch, September 16, Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire stated that the vision at the inception of Circle was to build a new open economic layer for the internet, allowing money, contracts, and machines to operate on a new distributed computing engine. Thus, Arc Chain was born.

On September 19, Arc Chain announced that it had launched agent payments, providing a hosted access path for x402 developers.

Clearly, Arc, which started from a stablecoin network, has inherent advantages and broad application scenarios in AI Agent payments, but this does not match the currently popular meme coin market. Previously, crypto researcher Ignas had stated that transactions on Arc Chain "lack FOMO," believing that Arc focuses more on foreign exchange, payments, and tokenization scenarios, and that the team's support for Crypto Native culture is relatively limited.

Well-known meme coin trader Bonkguy has also repeatedly stated, saying **that "Arc is essentially a stablecoin public chain, and may find suitable applications for stablecoins in the future. Although I have bought meme coins on Arc, I plan to hold them for at most a few days, and emphasize that if participating in meme coin trading on Arc, it should be viewed as a short-term opportunity." He even once warned not to get stuck in Arc.

The recent rapid silence of the ecosystem on Arc Chain also validates the market's judgment.

How Can Arc Chain Turn Things Around? It Can Only Rely on Token Airdrops and Institutional Adoption

Data from DefiLlama shows that the net revenue of apps on Arc Chain in the last 24 hours was only about $1,191; its Dex trading volume peaked at $131 million on September 17 but has been declining daily, with trading volume dropping to about $41 million on September 20, a decrease of nearly 70%.

At present, the scale of AI Agent payments is still insufficient to support the operation of the Arc Chain ecosystem. To achieve a successful turnaround, it can only hope for ARC token airdrops and large-scale institutional adoption.

On September 16, Circle announced the completion of the minting of 10 billion ARC tokens, but emphasized that this is only a technical milestone and does not represent a commitment to public issuance; the company is exploring the possibility of transitioning the consensus mechanism from proof of authority to proof of stake by 2027. According to Bubblemaps monitoring, Circle subsequently distributed all ARC tokens to 11 addresses through empty addresses, which can be tracked in real-time on-chain.

According to the previous token white paper, the ARC token distribution plan is:

• 60% allocated to the ecosystem (token sales, developer funding, network growth);
• 25% allocated to Circle (protocol development, staking, and governance);
• 15% allocated to long-term reserves (strategic flexibility and economic stability).

Whether the 6 billion ARC tokens can feedback to ecosystem construction and drive ecological development will depend on how the Arc Chain team plans the corresponding uses and issuance methods. This point was also mentioned by crypto researcher Ignas: one of Arc's potential attractions may come from the ARC token airdrop, as he noted that Arc plans to use 60% of its tokens for the "ecosystem," but it is expected that the relevant tokens may be more used for incentive payments, foreign exchange, and tokenization partnerships rather than for Degen traders.

Another direction is institutional adoption.

Previously, Robinhood announced on the first day of Arc Chain's mainnet launch that it would soon support the L1 network Arc built by Circle, allowing users to directly deposit and withdraw USDC within the supported network. Although Robinhood Chain and Arc Chain have some competition in user markets and meme coin markets, as a payment network L1, Arc remains an essential part that many institutions, trading platforms, and payment networks cannot avoid.

Earlier, on the day of Arc Chain's launch, it invited a number of big names from Wall Street and the crypto space to attend the launch event, and its first batch of 11 founding validators included BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, among others. BlackRock had also planned to deploy its BUIDL fund to Arc to support on-chain subscriptions and redemptions. In summary, the favorable conditions from the upcoming genius bill will further promote the adoption of Arc Chain by more institutions, making it an important node in the global stablecoin payment network.

Of course, returning to the initial topic, the survival situation of launchpads on Arc Chain remains worrying, and the revenue from DeFi projects is also quite dismal, with many projects generating 24-hour revenues of zero. Although the number of addresses on-chain seems to be in the tens of thousands, Arc Chain still has a long way to go for growth.