#Gate exclusively supports 0Gas transactions for gold-mining users

Circle’s public chain Arc officially launches, with Gate exclusively supporting 0Gas transactions🔥🔥🔥
I. What is ARC?
The most fundamental difference between Arc and other chains: it does not rely on a “native token” 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 (that is, today).
Its differences from mainstream public chains are concentrated in four areas:
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, users can trade and issue tokens directly with USDC for settlement, without first hoarding a volatile token. The official native assets are USDC (gas + settlement), EURC, and USYC. It has its own CCTP cross-chain bridge and Paymaster-sponsored transactions. It does not pursue spectacular TPS figures.
Its positioning is as a “financial settlement layer,” not a general-purpose public chain.
Its goals are cross-border payments, stablecoin settlement, foreign exchange, asset tokenization, and institutional fund management. It has a built-in StableFX foreign exchange engine and deep integration with Circle’s own CCTP cross-chain bridge and Paymaster-sponsored transactions. It does not pursue spectacular TPS figures.
Consensus starts with a permissioned model, with institutions serving as validators.
Founding validators 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-chain,” after which staking governance will be opened to ARC holders. This is the complete opposite of Ethereum’s permissionless validator set.
There is an independent “coordination asset,” ARC.
There are initially 10 billion tokens, with approximately 60% allocated to the ecosystem, 25% to Circle, and 15% held 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. a16z led the round, 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 tech stack to build an L2, uses ETH to pay gas, and its selling point is U.S. stock tokenization; Arc is a self-built L1 by Circle, uses USDC to pay gas, and its selling point is 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, a fact that is already unfolding: the launchpad war began well before the mainnet. More than ten meme launchpads have publicly laid out 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 narrative is almost unanimous: find “the next PONS.” Derivatives are also riding 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 launched on July 1, meme coins took 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 reached a record $563.9 million, with 16,639 tokens created in a single day; on August 29, daily trading volume surpassed $1 billion for the first time.
Arc has lower friction.
USDC-denominated gas + subsecond finality is precisely the most comfortable configuration for “gold mining”—there is no need to first swap into a gas token, and users will not be eaten up by fees at launch. Overseas analysts have also directly described Arc’s opening as “the casino opening early.”
In my view, the logic constraining the “strength of replication” deserves more attention:
Arc lacks Robinhood’s “native playable assets.”
The reason Robinhood was able to grow “stock-coin memes” (such as BONER/HIMS and AI/NVDA, where tokenized stocks serve as quote assets) is that the chain comes with a pool of tokenized stocks. Arc has no such native assets and can only rely on third parties to bridge assets from other chains—and projects such as longsupply, a “centralized custody + IOUs minted out of thin air on Arc” fake bridge, have already appeared on Arc. Its founder controls the treasury private key, placing it clearly in a high-risk category.
The user base is different.
Robinhood comes with a tens-of-millions retail-user gateway, making it “a chain with users”; 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 enter stablecoin pools and lending markets.
The official team neither endorses nor protects the market. Circle has explicitly stated that it does not endorse any launchpad or token. Most launchpad contracts are unaudited and have issues including duplicate deployment of tokens with the same name, self-trading and volume inflation by platform tokens (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 and permissioned validators also mean there is considerably more room than on Robinhood Chain for tighter compliance and fund-compliance reviews later.
In the short term (the first 2–4 weeks), the new-chain path of “stablecoins entering → launchpad melee → a few leaders → platform tokens” will almost certainly play out once, and may move even faster than Robinhood because preparations were completed two months in advance; but it will look more like a scaled-down copy with a short half-life, lacking Robinhood’s original “stock tokens × memes” narrative 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, along with the implementation of payment and RWA businesses.#Gate广场中秋团圆局