The enterprise-level blockchain Arc launched by Circle has officially gone live. According to the company's previous positioning, this blockchain is focused on stablecoin payments and institutional financial infrastructure. However, on the first day of its launch, the activities on the chain did not revolve around payments; instead, the trading activity mainly came from meme coins.
High trading volume on the first day, but a limited proportion of payments
On-chain browser data shows that Arc processed approximately 7.83 million transactions in the past 24 hours, with about 400,000 new accounts added and over 73,000 contracts deployed. Meanwhile, since the launch of Arc, the total number of USDC transfers has only been around 624,000, which is not a high proportion compared to the overall number of transactions.
Handling fees have also increased in a short period of time, with the average fee rising to about 3 cents, which is approximately four times higher than the earlier levels. However, looking at the operation of the chain itself, Arc still maintains a block generation time of half a second, and there has not been any noticeable congestion yet.
Meme coins quickly dominate online traffic on the blockchain
Arc On the first day, the main activity came from meme coin trading. Reports mentioned that tokens such as TOLLY, LONG, and COOL saw a surge at the beginning of their launch but then quickly fell back, dropping by 56% to 77% respectively from their initial highs.
On the first day, DEX had a trading volume of approximately 82 million US dollars, which is significantly lower than Robinhood Chain's 878 million US dollars in similar market conditions in July. At that time, the latter was also quickly dominated by meme coin trading under the narrative of institutional investors.
There is a discrepancy between the institutional positioning and actual usage.
Arc was launched on Wednesday, with the first batch of validators including 11 institutions such as BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, and DTCC. Circle's Chief Executive Officer, Jeremy Allaire, has referred to it as the most important release since the company's launch of USDC.
Currently, platforms such as Aave, Morpho, and DeFi are already operating on Arc, indicating that the infrastructure of this chain is now available for use. However, based on the data from the first day, what the market has embraced more quickly is high-volatility speculative trading, rather than the payment functionality that Circle originally emphasized.
Some market participants have thus questioned that the current positioning of Arc is not clear enough: is it closer to a meme coin trading platform, or is it an enterprise chain aimed at institutional settlements and stablecoins? CoinDesk stated that Circle has not commented on this yet.
