Failed to replicate the explosive miracle of Robinhood Chain.

Written by: Wenser (@wenser 2010), Planet Daily

Less than a week after the mainnet launch on September 16, the popularity of the Arc chain has rapidly cooled, and the major launch platforms that were highly anticipated before the launch have also fallen into an awkward business phase.

According to DefiLlama data, several Meme Launchpads on the Arc chain had less than $200 in protocol revenue in the past 24 hours: Solon earned only $503, ARK Launch and Tolly earned $180 and $171 respectively, while 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 not generated any income yet.

By forcefully copying the development path of Robinhood Chain, Arc chain has faced its own moment of failure. Looking back at the recent explosive rise of Arc chain followed by a rapid cooling in the market, one can only say that this was all foreshadowed.

A week belonging to Arc chain: "Indian team" controversy, "$10,000 small incentive", "AI Agent payment positioning"

For Arc chain, backed by the stablecoin giant Circle, the past week cannot be described as very smooth.

Although many crypto-native projects came to "collectively visit" Arc chain before the mainnet launch, most were more focused on seizing their own market and users rather than injecting their existing user base and liquidity into the Arc ecosystem. This can be seen from many partners talking a lot about "providing support" and "integrating access" while avoiding discussions on corresponding incentives or actual actions. (Recommended reading: "On the first day of Arc’s launch, crypto infrastructure projects collectively celebrated, is the next Robinhood Chain coming?")

Specifically, the issues Arc chain encountered were not just about initial incentives, but accompanied by a series of market controversies and marketing blunders.

Firstly, there was the "Indian team" controversy regarding an online meeting of the Arc chain.

On the first day of launch, a screenshot of an online meeting circulated widely in the crypto community, where several members who appeared to be of Indian and African descent led many to mistakenly believe this was an online meeting of the Arc chain team, even giving rise to outrageous statements like "Arc chain is actually an Indian project." As a result of this news, the Meme tokens on Arc chain saw a significant drop, with crypto KOL Him stating: "The Arc chain live stream looks scarier than the Federal Reserve's FOMC meeting."

However, the reality was that this meeting screenshot was merely the online appearance of developers within the Arc chain ecosystem, and most participants were not official team members, including the Indian individual who went viral, who was actually the founder of the Arc project @Xylonet_. It can only be said that rumors spread more widely than truth, and in a crypto circle that emphasizes "white background," this rumor quickly dealt a serious blow to the technical image that Arc chain had carefully crafted.

Secondly, there was the controversy surrounding the "small incentive of $10,000" launched by Arc chain officials.

On September 17, the second day after the mainnet launch, Arc announced a small funding program. The announcement stated: "This program will provide 20 grants of 500 USDC each to qualified early developers who launch operable Mini Apps on the Arc mainnet, with a total funding amount of 10,000 USDC, covering early projects, prototypes, and proof of concept applications." Yes, you read that correctly, it is not $100,000, nor $1 million, but $10,000. Just looking at this number, it is hard to imagine that this is an incentive activity launched by an L1 blockchain that is favored by Wall Street institutions and has raised hundreds of millions.

Although Arc officials had previously released a description of "up to 1 million dollars for ecosystem builders," compared to that, this small incentive of $10,000 took the market by shock — it is hard to understand why the official team of Arc chain would do such a thing at a time when they most needed "brave men under heavy rewards" at the start of the launch.

Thirdly, the controversy regarding "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 founding of Circle was to build a new open economic layer for the internet, allowing currency, contracts, and machines to operate on a new distributed computing engine. The Arc chain was born out of this.

On September 19, Arc chain officials announced the launch of agent payments, providing a managed access path for x402 developers.

It is clear that Arc, starting from the stablecoin network, has inherent advantages and broad application scenarios in AI Agent payments, but this clearly does not match the currently hot Meme coin market. Previously, crypto researcher Ignas had stated that the transactions on Arc chain had "no FOMO," believing that Arc focuses more on foreign exchange, payments, and tokenization scenarios, with limited support for Crypto Native culture.

Notable Meme coin trader Bonkguy has also repeatedly stated that "Arc is essentially a stablecoin public chain, and may find suitable applications such as stablecoins in the future, although he has bought Meme coins on Arc, but plans to hold them for at most a few days, and emphasizes that if participating in Meme coin trading on Arc, it should be viewed as a short-term opportunity." He even warned, "Do not get stuck in Arc."

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

How to turn around for Arc chain? Only hope for token airdrops and institutional adoption

DefiLlama data shows that the net income of apps on Arc chain is only about $1,191 in 24 hours; its Dex trading volume peaked at $131 million on September 17 but has since dropped daily, falling to around $41 million by September 20, a decline of nearly 70%.

At present, the scale of AI Agent payments is still difficult to support the operation of the Arc chain ecosystem. To achieve a successful turnaround, more hope lies in the ARC token airdrop 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 transition of 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 whitepaper, the ARC token distribution plan is as follows:

• 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 the ecological construction and drive ecological development depends on how the Arc chain team plans the corresponding uses and issuance methods. This point has also been mentioned by the previously mentioned crypto researcher Ignas: one potential attraction of Arc may come from the ARC token airdrop, as he mentioned that Arc plans to use 60% of its tokens for the "ecosystem," but it is expected that the related tokens may be used more 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 the Arc chain mainnet launch that it would soon support the L1 network Arc built by Circle, allowing users to deposit and withdraw USDC directly 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 integral part that many institutions, trading platforms, and payment networks cannot avoid.

Earlier, on the day of Arc chain launch, several big shots from Wall Street and the crypto circle were invited to attend the press conference, and its first batch of 11 founding validators includes BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, and the American Depository and Clearing Company. BlackRock had even planned to deploy the BUIDL fund to Arc to support on-chain subscriptions and redemptions. In summary, favorable future legislation will further drive Arc chain to be adopted by more institutions, becoming 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 concerning, the procedural income of DeFi projects is also quite dismal, with many projects having a 24-hour income of zero. Although the number of addresses on-chain seems to be in the hundreds of thousands, the growth of Arc chain still has a long way to go.