#Gate Gold-Farming Degens Exclusively Supported for 0Gas Transactions

Circle's public chain Arc officially launches, with Gate Gold-Farming Degens exclusively supporting 0Gas transactions🔥🔥🔥

I. What Is ARC
The most fundamental difference between Arc and other chains: it does not rely on a "native coin" to survive
Arc is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 built by Circle (the issuer of USDC), with its public mainnet opening on September 16, 2026 (today).

Its differences from mainstream public chains center on four points:

Gas is paid in USDC, with fees denominated in dollars.
This is the most obvious point. Ethereum requires holding ETH, and Solana requires holding SOL. On Arc, trading and token issuance are settled directly in USDC, with no need to first stock up on a volatile token. Its official native assets are USDC (gas + settlement), EURC, and USYC. It has its own CCTP cross-chain functionality and Paymaster fee payment. It is not chasing TPS spectacles.

It is positioned as a "financial settlement layer," not a general-purpose public chain.
Its targets are cross-border payments, stablecoin settlement, foreign exchange, asset tokenization, and institutional fund management. It has a built-in StableFX foreign exchange engine and deeply integrates Circle's own CCTP cross-chain functionality and Paymaster fee payment. It is not chasing TPS spectacles

Consensus starts with permissioned participation, with institutions acting as validators.
The founding validator nodes include 11 institutions such as BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, ICE (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange), Standard Chartered, MoneyGram, Galaxy, and SBI. The network is protected by "institutions building applications on the chain," with staking governance later opened to ARC holders. This is the complete opposite of Ethereum's permissionless validator set.

It has an independent "coordination asset," ARC.
There are initially 10 billion tokens, with approximately 60% allocated to the ecosystem, 25% to Circle, and 15% as a long-term reserve. Annual issuance will increase by 2–3%, for staking and governance. The May presale raised $222 million, with a fully diluted valuation of approximately $3 billion, led by a16z with participation from BlackRock and others.
ARC ≠ a gas token; this is the biggest structural difference between it and almost all new chains.

The comparison with Robinhood Chain makes this clearer: Robinhood uses the Arbitrum Orbit technology stack to build an L2, pays gas in ETH, and pitches tokenized U.S. stocks; Arc is a Circle-built L1, pays gas in USDC, and pitches stablecoin settlement and institutional finance.

II. Will on-chain memes replicate Robinhood?
The answer is: "The script will repeat, but most likely in a scaled-down version"
First, the facts already unfolding: the launchpad war began long before the mainnet. More than ten meme launchpads have publicly announced plans for Arc, including Tolly, Warp, Archemist, Arcpad, Synthra, ArcadeSwap, and RadarDEX. Tolly, which has the highest actual trading volume, has accumulated approximately $1.5–2.5 million in volume and launched approximately 170–200 tokens, while RadarDEX claims to have launched more than 2,000 tokens. The community's messaging is almost unanimous: find "the next PONS." Derivatives are also jumping on the trend: edgeX launched USD/JPY perpetuals on September 16, with 150+ markets to be added later.

The logic supporting "replication": Robinhood's template is too powerful. One week after the mainnet went live on July 1, meme coins had taken over the traffic: CASHCAT rose 2,158% in seven days and briefly reached a market cap of $156 million, while the total on-chain RWA value was only $12.81 million; on July 8, daily DEX trading volume hit a record $563.9 million, with 16,639 tokens created in a single day, and on August 29 daily trading volume exceeded $1 billion for the first time.

Arc has lower friction.
USDC-denominated gas + sub-second finality is precisely the most comfortable configuration for "degen trading"—there is no need to first swap for a gas token, and fees will not eat into traders' positions at launch. Overseas analysis has also directly described Arc's opening as "the casino opening early."

The logic constraining the "strength of replication" is, in my view, more worth noting:
Arc lacks Robinhood's "native playable asset."
The reason Robinhood was able to grow "stock-coin memes" (plays such as BONER/HIMS and AI/NVDA that use stock tokens as quote assets) is that the chain comes with a tokenized stock pool. Arc has no such endogenous assets and can only rely on third parties to bridge assets from other chains—and projects such as longsupply, a "centralized custody + minting IOUs out of thin air on Arc" fake bridge, have already appeared on Arc. Its founder controls the treasury's private keys, placing it firmly in the high-risk category.
The user bases are different.
Robinhood comes with a retail-user funnel in the tens of millions, making it "a chain with people"; Circle is a B2B company, and Arc's Day-1 ecosystem list consists of Aave, Uniswap, Curve, Morpho, and a group of market makers.
The initial funds are more likely to flow into stablecoin pools and lending markets.
The official team neither endorses projects nor will it support prices. Circle has explicitly stated that it does not endorse any launchpad or token. Most launchpad contracts are unaudited and face issues including duplicate deployments of tokens with the same name, platform tokens generating wash volume through self-trading (approximately 84% of Warp's trading volume comes from its own $WARP), and holder rewards that "exist only on paper and cannot be claimed."
The institutional positioning + permissioned validators also means there is considerably more room than on Robinhood Chain for subsequent tightening of compliance and fund-compliance reviews.

In the short term (the first 2–4 weeks), the new-chain path of "stablecoins enter → launchpads battle it out → a few leaders emerge → platform tokens" will almost certainly play out once, perhaps even faster than on Robinhood, because preparations were completed two months ahead of time; but it looks more like a scaled-down copy with a fast half-life, lacking an original narrative like Robinhood's "stock tokens × memes" to sustain it.
What truly determines this chain's long-term value is not memes, but the actual settlement volume of USDC after the mainnet launch and the implementation of payment and RWA businesses.#Gate广场中秋团圆局