The verification nodes are Wall Street, and trading first rushes to meme coins.

Written by: Boaz Sobrado

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Bullcheese, a type of launchpad, opens on the same day as the mainnet, allowing creators to take away 75% of the transaction fees, settled in USDC. Circle's Arc has invited BlackRock, Visa, and DTCC to produce blocks. A chain designed for settling and tokenizing funds, the first batch of active users consists of meme coin traders.

Institutions want an operating system; the market first provided a casino

On September 16, 2026, Circle announced the launch of the Arc public mainnet. The official positioning is as an "economic operating system of the internet" — aimed at payments, foreign exchange, trading, lending, issuance, and the agent economy. USDC circulation exceeds $74 billion, gas is paid directly with US dollar stablecoins, settlement occurs in sub-second speeds, and the verification nodes come from traditional finance. Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire described this as "the most influential platform release since USDC."

Robbie Mitchnick, Global Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock, had a more restrained statement: dedicated chains help bring specific scenarios to life, and Arc "appears well-suited for large-scale service of stablecoins and payment applications." Michael Blaugrund, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at ICE, pointed out the customer pain points — predictable fees and instant final confirmation. These remarks point to the same category of users: banks, asset management institutions, and payment networks.

The first set of users to operate on the mainnet are another group. The launchpad has brought token creation forms, charts, and "one-click token issuance" to the desktop. The underlying chain is guarded by clearing houses and card organizations, while the upper layer is open for issuance to anyone.

What is this chain packed with

The design of Arc can be summarized in six key points: transaction fees paid in USDC; final confirmations made with deterministic settlement according to financial market standards; privacy features are optional, still in the rollout stage across the network; positioned as the issuance and interoperability hub for USDC, EURC, and tokenized assets; from its inception, AI agents are regarded as economic participants; verification collection employs a permissioned system and supports post-quantum signatures.

The founding verification nodes are phased in, including BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo, Visa, and Worldpay, which has merged into Global Payments, with Circle also included. The peripheral ecosystem has expanded from over 100 during the testing phase to over 190 at the mainnet launch. On the banking side are BNY Mellon, HSBC, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered, and State Street; asset management and RWA sides include Bitwise, Janus Henderson, Maple; exchanges include Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX; custodians like Anchorage, BitGo, Fireblocks; and lending protocols connected with Aave V4 and Morpho on the first day. Circle also included Pump.fun, fomo, Uniswap, Aero in the trading facility list on the first day. The official narrative did not entirely exclude meme coins, only placing them at the end of the narrative order.

Tokenized assets are at the core of the institutional story. Circle's USYC, BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized via Securitize, private credit products, and cirBTC are included in the basket of "tradable, lendable, and collateralizable" assets. The asset tokenization arrangement between DTCC and Circle is set to take effect in the second half of 2027. These products will determine whether Arc possesses substantive financial infrastructure three years later; they do not dictate what will be inscribed in the blocks during the first week of going live.

This week, Circle completed the genesis minting of 10 billion ARC tokens in the US, claiming to be the first publicly listed company to mint network tokens for a new Layer 1. The company emphasized repeatedly: minting is a technological milestone, not a public offering commitment; discussions about shifting from proof of authority to proof of stake will happen in 2027. Fees will still be paid in USDC. If there are already tokens with the same name trading on the market, they are not Circle's ARC.

Why will meme trading come first

The reasons are specific, not mysterious.

First, the pricing unit is the US dollar. Issuing tokens, making markets, and collecting fees do not need to go through a layer of volatile underlying assets first. For the launchpad, USDC is both gas and the quoted currency, and it is also the settlement asset that creators ultimately hope to obtain.

Second, EVM compatibility allows contracts and tools to be migrated directly. The testnet ran for less than a year and processed over 700 million transactions, with the developer community claiming 75,000 active members. For meme projects, the migration cost is close to zero.

Third, cold starts need noise. A permissioned verification collection allows banks to confidently link their wallets to the public chain, but it cannot fill blocks in the first week. Meme coins generate addresses, transaction numbers, and fee income at the lowest cost while dragging the "institutional chain" back into the retail conversation space.

Fourth, there are precedents in the market. The Robinhood Chain launched on July 1, 2026, initially targeting tokenized assets, but meme coin trading dominated within weeks. On August 30, the network processed 5.52 million transactions in a single day, with daily DEX trading volume reaching approximately $875 million, and on-chain application revenue exceeding Ethereum at one point. Traders call Arc "the next Robinhood trench," betting on the same set of attention transfer logic.

Circle had previously expressed a desire for the community to reduce the supply of launchpads and meme coins, so that Arc could first be recognized as a payment and agent network. However, with Pump.fun and BlackRock appearing on the mainnet list at the same time, it indicates that the company understands: If retail speculation is completely blocked, the chain will remain in a cold start state for a long time.

Bullcheese is not the only player, but it is the one closest to Forbes's lead.

Forbes named Bullcheese, not because it has already won, but because it has written "retail issuance on institutional chains" most plainly.

This platform operated by TrustSwap launched on the same day as the mainnet, does not employ a joint curve, and does not set a graduation line. All supply is injected into a Uniswap v3 concentrated liquidity position located above the current price, with only tokens in the position, no pre-emptive USDC. Buyers bring their own dollars; after the price crosses the range, the position gradually converts to USDC. Liquidity is locked in a Team Finance contract, not destroyed; the default lock-up period is 90 days, during which fees can be claimed, and after the period, creators can choose to renew the lock and continue earning fee flows. The platform claims a 75% revenue share for creators, settled in USDC. The first transaction is already in a regular DEX pool, and aggregators can route normally.

Compared to the model of Pump.fun on Solana, the difference lies in the migration phase. The curve model prices within the platform contract first, and after a few tokens reach a threshold, they migrate to an external pool, which may experience slippage, delays, or be front-run; most tokens may never "graduate." The one-sided concentrated position model has no such gate and also spreads risks early: there is no internal trading filter mechanism, so low-quality tokens can be traded from the first second.

There are more than seven launchpads targeting Arc before the mainnet. In a public comparison, Arch adopts a similar one-sided V3 pool design; Sharc still retains graduation events, closer to the curve model; ubi.fun's fee narrative leans towards holders rather than creators; 5042, AstraPump, and ARCLaunch still had many undisclosed terms at that time. More than half of the boxes in the comparison table were marked as "undisclosed." For creators, the first thing to examine is not the revenue share but how liquidity is locked, whether fees can be collected during the lock period, and whether the position still exists after the lock period; for buyers, the first thing to confirm is whether the first transaction has been completed in the public pool. Website copy does not constitute evidence; the block explorer does.

On the day of the mainnet launch, tokens related to "USDC is cool" and official cat videos entered trading sight. This does not prove that Arc will become the new Solana; it only proves what kind of assets are the first to produce K-lines during the cold start phase.

Two timelines that should not be confused

The institutional timeline advances quarterly: privacy features open across the network, payment shards increase throughput, agent identities can be audited, discussions about PoS and the public role of ARC tokens will happen in 2027, with DTCC's on-chain asset custody coming even later. These decisions determine whether Arc can serve bank treasurers and fund subscriptions/redemptions.

The retail timeline advances hourly: which launchpad gains traffic first, which token forms a narrative first, and whether there is a premium for off-market USDC. During the pre-sale stage, some reported off-market prices nearing double, indicating that capital is willing to pay for "early entry" but not necessarily that this capital will persist.

The two lines can coexist temporarily. BlackRock producing blocks does not review meme tokens in the pool; Visa acting as a verification node does not endorse any meme projects. Permissioned verification addresses network-level confrontations and compliance perimeters but cannot solve token quality issues. Understanding "chain security" as "coin security" is the most expensive misreading of the mainnet week.

Circle also layers an interest structure: it both issues USDC and builds the settlement layer for USDC's operation; BlackRock manages reserves while also acting as a verification node and ecosystem participant. This provides a reason for institutional clients to feel "familiar," while the neutrality argument can be cited as a lever. The GENIUS Act provides a clearer compliance framework for US dollar stablecoins but does not address how conflicts of interest are disclosed and isolated when the issuer and chain operator are the same company.

The only judgment that can be made right now is one sentence

Arc is built for institutions like BlackRock, Visa, and DTCC. In the first week of the mainnet, it was the meme coin launchpads that first filled the blocks. Institutional products are still being integrated, while retail issuance has grown freely outside of the permissioned system. What needs to be observed next is not the slogans, but three sets of numbers: whether stablecoins and tokenized fund shares are substantively on-chain, whether the launchpad transactions can convert noise into continuous fee income, and whether Circle will adjust its stance between "serious infrastructure" and "must rely on speculative cold start."

Meme coins can ignite a new chain, but they may also skew the narrative. Arc is currently advancing two things at the same time. Which one becomes the main business first needs to be determined by real on-chain funds, not press releases.