The Arc mainnet is expected to launch this summer.

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

This article was originally published on April 7

By the end of March 2026, Circle's public blockchain Arc announced the start of building a "base" for the community during its public testing phase.

Arc simultaneously launched the Arc House community center and the Architects program. The former serves as the core technical community and communication platform of the Arc ecosystem, while the latter is a systematic ambassador incentive mechanism—rewarding individuals who make genuine contributions in technology building, community operations, content creation, and offline activities.

What is Arc House: More than just a forum

The official positioning is as "the central hub of the Arc ecosystem," bringing educational content, discussions, online and offline activities, resources, contribution recognition, and interest groups together with regional Meetups in one place.

However, it has an essential difference from common community forums. Most community forums have high information noise and difficulty in content accumulation. Arc House is more like a combination of a forum and a points system: posting, answering technical questions, participating in events, and completing courses—each action will be quantified into points, becoming the core basis for subsequent level promotions and rights unlocking.

Architects Program: Points-driven ambassador mechanism

Architects is Arc's community ambassador program, covering the full path from ordinary participants to regional leaders, divided into six tiers from Tier 0 to Tier 5. As long as contributions continue, points accumulate naturally, and levels rise accordingly.

How to earn points?

Points are the core driving force of the Architects program and can be earned from the following five categories:

1. Basic Account Category

• ID Verification: 100 points (need LinkedIn or company email)
• Completing user profile: 50 points.

2. Hackathon / Challenge Category

• Hackathon participant: 200 points;
• Hackathon winner: 500 points;
• Developer Challenge winner: 100 points;
• Bounty Winner: 150 points.

3. Community Participation Category

• Daily activity (active in Arc House): 5 points;
• Arc tester (providing product and service feedback): 300 points;
• Arc Day Ones (or members of the first Arc projects): 500 points;
• Circle grant recipients: 500 points;
• Course Champion (completing a course): 200 points.

4. Content / Community Interaction Category

• Publishing articles in Arc House: 200 points;
• Watching videos (maximum 1 time within 24 hours): 5 points;
• Reading content (maximum 5 times within 24 hours): 5 points each time;
• Posting (posting in the community forum, maximum 1 time within 24 hours): 10 points;
• Forum comments / replies (maximum 4 times within 24 hours): 5 points each time;
• Blog / video comments / replies (maximum 2 times within 24 hours): 10 points each time;
• Answers adopted (published technical answers marked as "adopted", maximum 1 time within 24 hours): 30 points.

5. Arc Community Activities, Guidance, and Speaking Category

• Hosting Arc core gatherings (collaborating with the Arc team to host offline gatherings, must hold gathering organizer badge): 1000 points;
• Hosting Arc technical Meetups (collaborating with the Arc team, must hold Meetup organizer and technical speaker badges): 1500 points;
• Hosting Arc Meetup Builder meetings (collaborating with the Arc team, must hold gathering organizer badge, online or offline): 500 points;
• Independent speakers at events (must hold technical speaker badge): 500 points;
• Panel speakers (participating in panel/roundtable discussions at Arc-approved events): 300 points;
• Online meeting hosts (invited to serve as hosts/speakers for Arc-approved online events): 300 points;
• Online event registration (registering for online events in Arc House): 5 points;
• Participating in online events (participating in Arc House online events): 20 points;
• Event participation (attending and participating in Arc House events as a participant): 50 points.

As can be seen, the weight design of different contributions reveals the emphasis: points for organizing events and technical speaking are much higher than for daily posting. Circle encourages genuine participation and technical depth, not mere content flooding.

How to promote levels?

The Architects program is layered from Tier 0 to Tier 5, unlocking different roles at different levels.

After registering an account in Arc House, users default to Tier 0. At this stage, there are no exclusive rights and participants need to accumulate 500 points and actively join the Architects program to officially enter this system.

500 points is the first threshold and also the starting point for officially becoming an "Architect." From here, you will receive a digital badge corresponding to your Tier level, gain access to exclusive thematic groups, and have the chance to receive invitations to Architect-only events.

After reaching 3500 points, you will automatically be promoted to Tier 2, and the application channels for three core roles will open simultaneously: community moderator, Meetup organizer, technical speaker. All three can be applied for concurrently, but each requires separate approval with clear capability thresholds; merely reaching points does not guarantee obtaining a role.

Tier 3 (15,000 points) opens opportunities for Architect Member Showcase speaking, as well as qualifications to participate in internal product testing and feedback roundtables at Circle.

Tier 4 (40,000 points) and Tier 5 (90,000 points) enter the path of regional leaders, corresponding to city-level and country-level Regional Leads, responsible for connecting local developer communities, universities, and startup ecosystems, assisting the Arc team in promoting regional activities.

Content Guidelines: What content does Arc encourage?

The Architects program comes with a content guideline stating what kind of content aligns with Arc's positioning, which Arc, Circle Developer, and even Circle's official accounts may be willing to share and amplify.

What content is encouraged?

• Specific technical details.
• Real application scenarios and development milestones.
• Narratives related to stablecoin finance, institutional adoption, and cross-border liquidity.
• Posts with screenshots, code snippets, and demo videos.

What content should be avoided?

• Any financial terminology involving yield, APR, staking rewards, and investment strategies.
• Token speculation, airdrop expectations, "Alpha" culture.
• Rocket and bull market emojis 🚀📈🐂.
• Attacks on other public chains or ecosystems.
• Claims of being "Arc official partners" or "collaborating with Circle" (unless authorized).
• Overly aggressive marketing.

In summary, Arc's content standards can be encapsulated as: say specifics, not grandiose; say usable, not speculative.

Notably, Architects are independent community participants in a legal sense and not Circle employees or agents.

Conclusion

Looking at Arc House and Architects together, Circle's logic is very clear.

Arc positions itself as "the economic operating system of the internet financial system," targeting developers, financial institutions, and Fintech, not retail investors and speculators. Correspondingly, the community it needs is not speculators, but a network of builders with technical depth who can create genuine products.

This entire design essentially aims to use community mechanisms to solve a cold start problem: how to accumulate a group of genuine contributors during the mainnet's testing phase and motivate them to continue participating and spreading the word.

Compared to the ambassador programs of most other public blockchains, Arc Architects have several noticeable differences: they strictly delineate legal boundaries (independent participants, not employees), clearly exclude token speculation narratives, and impose unusually detailed content standards on the community's public expressions.

This is driven by Circle's compliance gene. Circle is the issuer of USDC and is itself subject to strict regulation, with Arc as its ecosystem, thus community expressions need to comply with corresponding brand and legal requirements.

No matter how elaborate the points system or how detailed the content guidelines, they are just a framework. What truly determines how far this mechanism can go is whether there are enough developers willing to create something worth discussing on Arc. Circle provides the stage and the rules, but the content itself must be constructed by the builders.

From this perspective, the Architects program can be seen as not so much a contributor program but a public stress test—testing whether Arc's technical narrative can attract true builders, whether these builders can continue to invest in an atmosphere without token speculation, and also testing the extent of Circle's compliance path in the Web3 community.

The answer has yet to be revealed. But the door to Arc House is already open, and points are being counted.