Gas fees aren’t ETH—they’re paid in USDC.
Circle’s public chain Arc went live on the mainnet today. Founding validators: BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, ICE, Standard Chartered, SBI, Galaxy, and MoneyGram—all are key players in traditional financial settlement networks. Gas is paid with USDC, with sub-second finality.
Before launch, some people were accumulating aggressively—the cost was paying a 80%–100% premium in USDC. Two hours after launch, the data came out: 372 million USDC on-chain, across 176,000 addresses. But 372 million is only 0.05% of the total USDC supply.
These figures are contradictory: the premium is close to double, yet the migration volume is only five-thousandths. This suggests that what’s coming in isn’t large-scale movement of existing USDC balances, but early speculators—on-chain Memes have already run through a full cycle: ARCAT’s market cap briefly broke $5 million, up +1288% in 24 hours, with $1.6 million in trading volume. It then pulled back about 40% from its peak and is currently at $3.5 million.
Source: BlockBeats (with Ai Yi, GMGN)
Circle’s public chain Arc went live on the mainnet today. Founding validators: BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, ICE, Standard Chartered, SBI, Galaxy, and MoneyGram—all are key players in traditional financial settlement networks. Gas is paid with USDC, with sub-second finality.
Before launch, some people were accumulating aggressively—the cost was paying a 80%–100% premium in USDC. Two hours after launch, the data came out: 372 million USDC on-chain, across 176,000 addresses. But 372 million is only 0.05% of the total USDC supply.
These figures are contradictory: the premium is close to double, yet the migration volume is only five-thousandths. This suggests that what’s coming in isn’t large-scale movement of existing USDC balances, but early speculators—on-chain Memes have already run through a full cycle: ARCAT’s market cap briefly broke $5 million, up +1288% in 24 hours, with $1.6 million in trading volume. It then pulled back about 40% from its peak and is currently at $3.5 million.
Source: BlockBeats (with Ai Yi, GMGN)