I
Ishan Pandey
Guest
Circle's Arc went live on 16 September with something most new blockchains spend a year chasing: a way in. Thirteen exchanges switched on direct USDC transfers to the network on its first day, KuCoin among them, which means a user holding dollars on Binance, Kraken, OKX, Bybit, Gate, Upbit or KuCoin can move them onto Arc without routing through Ethereum or a bridge. KuCoin's chief executive BC Wong described the integration as a question of access rather than technology, Invezz reported: a chain built for payments and treasury matters only if the people and institutions holding dollars can reach it in one step. That is the larger point of the launch. For stablecoins to work as payment rails, the on-ramps matter as much as the chain. Circle arrived with most of the industry's on-ramps already connected.
Circle's launch list names thirteen exchanges live on day one: Binance, Bitso, Bitvavo, Bybit, Coinbase, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, MEXC, OKX, OSL, Upbit and Wenia. Ten wallets came with them, including MetaMask, Phantom, Ledger, Trust Wallet, Binance Wallet and OKX Wallet, plus the custodians Anchorage, BitGo and Fireblocks, four banks in BNY, HSBC, Societe Generale and State Street, plus the three largest DeFi protocols, Aave, Morpho and Uniswap, which deployed their existing contracts unchanged because Arc runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Circle put the total at more than 100 applications and institutional integrations on the first day.
Arc is a Layer 1 blockchain in which USDC is the gas token. Every fee on the network is paid in dollars, so a company moving money on Arc never has to hold a volatile coin to pay for the transfer. Circle minted 10 billion ARC tokens at genesis for staking, governance and network security, Datawallet reports, but fees stay in USDC and the chain launched under proof of authority, with a move to proof of stake planned for 2027. Consensus runs on Malachite, a Tendermint-style engine Circle acquired from Informal Systems, which produces blocks roughly every half second and reaches final settlement in under 350 milliseconds with twenty validators. There is no probabilistic confirmation window and no chain reorganisation: a payment that settles is settled. Execution uses Reth, the Rust Ethereum client, which is why Aave, Uniswap and Morpho could ship on day one without rewriting anything. Euro-denominated EURC is supported alongside USDC. Circle's StableFX engine offers payment-versus-payment settlement between more than twenty local-currency stablecoins around the clock. Opt-in confidential transactions using view keys are in development but were not live at launch.
The validator set is the part that separates Arc from every other chain launched this year. The eleven founding validators are BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa and Worldpay, with Circle itself making twelve. DTCC clears most of the US securities market; Visa and Mastercard run the card networks; ICE owns the New York Stock Exchange; BlackRock manages the largest asset pool in the world. A validator on a proof-of-authority chain is a party that signs blocks. Circle has chosen to have the institutions that already run the traditional settlement system sign them. That is a statement about who Arc is for. It is not retail traders.
Stablecoins outstanding grew from $161.5 billion in mid-2024 to $250.9 billion in mid-2025 and $314.7 billion by June this year, per CoinLaw's compilation of DefiLlama data. USDC is the second largest at about $75 billion on chain and $77 billion by Circle's own quarter-end count. The supply understates the flow. Circle reported $21.5 trillion of USDC transaction volume in the first quarter of 2026, up 263 percent on a year earlier, which is 279 times the outstanding supply turning over in three months. Most of that volume today runs on Ethereum, Solana, Base and other chains where Circle controls the token but not the rails. Arc is Circle's attempt to own the rails as well.
It also arrives into a race. Plasma, built around Tether's USDT, launched in September 2025; Stable, backed by Bitfinex and Hack VC, in December; Tempo, from Stripe and Paradigm, in March. Each is a chain where dollars are the native unit and the fee, Chainstack's comparison shows. Each arrived with its own distribution: Plasma with $2 billion of day-one liquidity from the Tether ecosystem, Tempo with Stripe's merchant base. Arc's answer is the exchange and validator lineup above. Thirteen exchanges on day one means USDC can flow onto Arc from most of the world's trading venues without a bridge, while the validators mean the institutions Circle wants as customers are already inside the network.
A new payments network starts with a chicken-and-egg problem. A merchant will not take dollars on a chain its customers cannot reach, a treasurer will not park funds where the custodian offers no support and an exchange has little reason to add a network nobody withdraws to. Each group on Circle's launch list removes one of those objections. Circle signed them up before switching the chain on, so none of them had to wait for the others.
Exchanges and wallets are the way in. Most people who hold digital dollars bought them on a trading venue first. In Latin America 64 percent of crypto activity runs through centralised exchanges, according to Chainalysis. Without direct exchange support a new chain has to rely on bridges, the contracts that lock a token on one network and issue a copy on another. Bridges have been one of crypto's costliest weak points: attackers took $2 billion across 13 bridge hacks in the first seven months of 2022, 69 percent of everything stolen that year up to that point. On Arc, USDC is issued by Circle on the chain itself, so a withdrawal from KuCoin or Kraken lands as the real token rather than a wrapped copy.
Custodians and banks are what institutions need before they can take part at all. A fund or a corporate treasury does not keep assets in a browser wallet; it holds them with a regulated custodian such as Anchorage Digital, BitGo or Fireblocks, all of which supported Arc on day one. Two names on the list already sit inside USDC itself. The Treasuries and cash that back the token are held in the Circle Reserve Fund, which BlackRock manages and BNY holds in custody. BlackRock is now an Arc validator and BNY a launch bank, so the firms that keep USDC's reserves also help run the chain where it is spent.
Payments companies and DeFi protocols give the dollars something to do. Circle's launch partners include the stablecoin card issuer Rain, the cross-border payments network Thunes and the payments app Wirex, which between them fund cards and pay out to bank accounts and mobile wallets. Aave, Morpho and Uniswap supply the rest: somewhere to lend, borrow and swap from the first block. Put together, the list covers every step a dollar takes, from the first deposit to the bank that holds the reserve behind it.
The validators are also bringing business of their own to the chain. DTCC, whose Depository Trust Company held more than $100 trillion of securities in custody last year, plans to tokenise DTC-custodied assets on Arc from the second half of 2027. BlackRock, which managed $15.3 trillion at the end of June, plans to bring BUIDL, its tokenised money market fund, so investors can subscribe and redeem in USDC on the same network. Standard Chartered is exploring custody, foreign exchange and repo. The card networks bring scale of a different order: Visa handled $17 trillion of payments and cash volume in its 2025 fiscal year and Mastercard $10.6 trillion of gross dollar volume in 2025. A sliver of either, routed through Arc, would be larger than everything the chain holds today.
Where USDC sits shows how much of the rail Circle does not yet own. Of the $75.4 billion of USDC in circulation on 28 September, $46.7 billion was on Ethereum, about 62 percent, according to DefiLlama. Hyperliquid, Solana and Base held another $19 billion between them. Arc, twelve days old, held about $460 million, or 0.6 percent. That is the gap the exchange lineup is meant to close. An exchange that supports both Ethereum and Arc works as a bridge with a balance sheet behind it: a customer deposits USDC on one network and withdraws it on the other, with no wrapped token in between.
KuCoin's own growth maps closely onto the users a dollar chain is built for. The exchange passed 45 million users in more than 200 countries and regions in July. In the first half of 2026 its new-user numbers grew 170 percent in Latin America and 30 percent in Africa. Those are the regions where stablecoins often do the job of a bank account. Chainalysis found that in the year to June 2025 stablecoins made up more than half of all exchange purchases in Argentine pesos, Brazilian reais and Colombian pesos. Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion on chain over the same period, up about 52 percent, with stablecoins carrying much of the trade between Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
For a KuCoin user in Buenos Aires or Lagos, direct support changes what a withdrawal needs and how long it takes to count. Sending USDC out over Ethereum means paying the network fee in ether; the transfer takes about 15 minutes to finalise. Over Solana the fee is paid in SOL and finality takes about 12.8 seconds. On Arc the fee is paid in USDC and the transfer is final in under 350 milliseconds. A user who holds only dollars can send only dollars, which removes the step where a first-time user has to buy a second token just to move the first.
Payments are where KuCoin's plans meet Arc's. In the first half of 2026 KuCoin Pay, the exchange's merchant payments service, more than tripled its off-chain payment volume, grew total orders about 25 times and added 60 percent more merchants and service partners. KuCoin also launched its KuCard in Australia on Mastercard's network, the same Mastercard that now signs Arc's blocks. A payments business built on digital dollars has an obvious use for a chain where the fee is in dollars and settlement is final in under a second.
Regulation is the other half of access. KuCoin's European arm won a MiCA licence from Austria's Financial Market Authority in November 2025, covering 29 countries in the European Economic Area. It registered with Australia's AUSTRAC the same month. Under MiCA, exchanges serving European customers can offer only stablecoins from authorised issuers. Circle became the first global issuer to comply in July 2024 and both USDC and EURC run on Arc. For an institution, being able to reach Arc starts with those three pieces: a licensed venue, a compliant token and a chain that settles it.
Arc's launch week was loud. Launchpads accounted for most of the first day's trading and 97,000 tokens were created in the first 24 hours, according to Whales Market. Twelve days on, the data describes a calmer and more useful network. Stablecoins on Arc peaked at $649 million on 17 September and eased to about $460 million by 27 September, according to DefiLlama, with most of the fall coming between 24 and 26 September as launch-week trading money moved on. Total value locked moved the other way over the same ten days, from $334 million to $520 million, a rise of 56 percent.
The growth has come almost entirely from the lending markets. By 28 September Morpho Blue held $288 million and Aave V4 $185 million, up from $181 million and $127 million on 18 September, a combined rise of 53 percent. The two markets still hold about 91 percent of the chain's locked value, the same share as ten days earlier. Trading has settled into a steadier rhythm. Arc's decentralised exchanges handled $73 million in the 24 hours to 28 September and $393 million over the week, about $56 million a day. Users paid $820,583 in network fees that day, every cent of it in USDC, while $9.8 million of net inflows arrived on the chain.
Chart 5: Total value locked on Arc by protocol, 18 and 28 September 2026. Sources: DefiLlama; Whales Market.
The pieces for the business Arc was built for are also going into place. Circle says 22 stablecoins are live or onboarding to StableFX, from Brazil's BRLA to Japan's JPYC and Turkey's TRYB, with settlement costing a fraction of a cent. That is the multi-currency plumbing a remittance company like MoneyGram or a card network like Visa would need before sending real payments through the chain. Whether they do is not yet visible in public data. BlackRock's BUIDL fund is still to arrive. DTCC's tokenised securities are due in the second half of 2027.
Twelve days is too soon to judge a payments chain. The early numbers still point the right way for one built like this: dollars arrived through thirteen exchanges on the first day, the launch-week froth has cleared and the lending base has grown by half. The next two quarters will show whether Visa, Mastercard, MoneyGram and Worldpay send payments through the blocks they sign, whether BUIDL and DTCC's tokenised securities arrive on schedule and whether exchanges such as KuCoin turn direct transfers into everyday use for the customers in Lagos and Buenos Aires who need dollars most. Thirteen exchanges have made it easy to get dollars onto Arc. Most of the dollars that stayed are now earning interest; the number worth watching is how many of them start paying for things.
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Vested Interest Disclosure: HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR.
Circle's launch list names thirteen exchanges live on day one: Binance, Bitso, Bitvavo, Bybit, Coinbase, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, MEXC, OKX, OSL, Upbit and Wenia. Ten wallets came with them, including MetaMask, Phantom, Ledger, Trust Wallet, Binance Wallet and OKX Wallet, plus the custodians Anchorage, BitGo and Fireblocks, four banks in BNY, HSBC, Societe Generale and State Street, plus the three largest DeFi protocols, Aave, Morpho and Uniswap, which deployed their existing contracts unchanged because Arc runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Circle put the total at more than 100 applications and institutional integrations on the first day.
What Arc is
Arc is a Layer 1 blockchain in which USDC is the gas token. Every fee on the network is paid in dollars, so a company moving money on Arc never has to hold a volatile coin to pay for the transfer. Circle minted 10 billion ARC tokens at genesis for staking, governance and network security, Datawallet reports, but fees stay in USDC and the chain launched under proof of authority, with a move to proof of stake planned for 2027. Consensus runs on Malachite, a Tendermint-style engine Circle acquired from Informal Systems, which produces blocks roughly every half second and reaches final settlement in under 350 milliseconds with twenty validators. There is no probabilistic confirmation window and no chain reorganisation: a payment that settles is settled. Execution uses Reth, the Rust Ethereum client, which is why Aave, Uniswap and Morpho could ship on day one without rewriting anything. Euro-denominated EURC is supported alongside USDC. Circle's StableFX engine offers payment-versus-payment settlement between more than twenty local-currency stablecoins around the clock. Opt-in confidential transactions using view keys are in development but were not live at launch.
The validator set is the part that separates Arc from every other chain launched this year. The eleven founding validators are BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa and Worldpay, with Circle itself making twelve. DTCC clears most of the US securities market; Visa and Mastercard run the card networks; ICE owns the New York Stock Exchange; BlackRock manages the largest asset pool in the world. A validator on a proof-of-authority chain is a party that signs blocks. Circle has chosen to have the institutions that already run the traditional settlement system sign them. That is a statement about who Arc is for. It is not retail traders.
The market Arc is built for
Stablecoins outstanding grew from $161.5 billion in mid-2024 to $250.9 billion in mid-2025 and $314.7 billion by June this year, per CoinLaw's compilation of DefiLlama data. USDC is the second largest at about $75 billion on chain and $77 billion by Circle's own quarter-end count. The supply understates the flow. Circle reported $21.5 trillion of USDC transaction volume in the first quarter of 2026, up 263 percent on a year earlier, which is 279 times the outstanding supply turning over in three months. Most of that volume today runs on Ethereum, Solana, Base and other chains where Circle controls the token but not the rails. Arc is Circle's attempt to own the rails as well.
It also arrives into a race. Plasma, built around Tether's USDT, launched in September 2025; Stable, backed by Bitfinex and Hack VC, in December; Tempo, from Stripe and Paradigm, in March. Each is a chain where dollars are the native unit and the fee, Chainstack's comparison shows. Each arrived with its own distribution: Plasma with $2 billion of day-one liquidity from the Tether ecosystem, Tempo with Stripe's merchant base. Arc's answer is the exchange and validator lineup above. Thirteen exchanges on day one means USDC can flow onto Arc from most of the world's trading venues without a bridge, while the validators mean the institutions Circle wants as customers are already inside the network.
Why a Payments Chain Needs Every Partner on the List
A new payments network starts with a chicken-and-egg problem. A merchant will not take dollars on a chain its customers cannot reach, a treasurer will not park funds where the custodian offers no support and an exchange has little reason to add a network nobody withdraws to. Each group on Circle's launch list removes one of those objections. Circle signed them up before switching the chain on, so none of them had to wait for the others.
Exchanges and wallets are the way in. Most people who hold digital dollars bought them on a trading venue first. In Latin America 64 percent of crypto activity runs through centralised exchanges, according to Chainalysis. Without direct exchange support a new chain has to rely on bridges, the contracts that lock a token on one network and issue a copy on another. Bridges have been one of crypto's costliest weak points: attackers took $2 billion across 13 bridge hacks in the first seven months of 2022, 69 percent of everything stolen that year up to that point. On Arc, USDC is issued by Circle on the chain itself, so a withdrawal from KuCoin or Kraken lands as the real token rather than a wrapped copy.
Custodians and banks are what institutions need before they can take part at all. A fund or a corporate treasury does not keep assets in a browser wallet; it holds them with a regulated custodian such as Anchorage Digital, BitGo or Fireblocks, all of which supported Arc on day one. Two names on the list already sit inside USDC itself. The Treasuries and cash that back the token are held in the Circle Reserve Fund, which BlackRock manages and BNY holds in custody. BlackRock is now an Arc validator and BNY a launch bank, so the firms that keep USDC's reserves also help run the chain where it is spent.
Payments companies and DeFi protocols give the dollars something to do. Circle's launch partners include the stablecoin card issuer Rain, the cross-border payments network Thunes and the payments app Wirex, which between them fund cards and pay out to bank accounts and mobile wallets. Aave, Morpho and Uniswap supply the rest: somewhere to lend, borrow and swap from the first block. Put together, the list covers every step a dollar takes, from the first deposit to the bank that holds the reserve behind it.
The validators are also bringing business of their own to the chain. DTCC, whose Depository Trust Company held more than $100 trillion of securities in custody last year, plans to tokenise DTC-custodied assets on Arc from the second half of 2027. BlackRock, which managed $15.3 trillion at the end of June, plans to bring BUIDL, its tokenised money market fund, so investors can subscribe and redeem in USDC on the same network. Standard Chartered is exploring custody, foreign exchange and repo. The card networks bring scale of a different order: Visa handled $17 trillion of payments and cash volume in its 2025 fiscal year and Mastercard $10.6 trillion of gross dollar volume in 2025. A sliver of either, routed through Arc, would be larger than everything the chain holds today.
Where the Dollars Are Today
Where USDC sits shows how much of the rail Circle does not yet own. Of the $75.4 billion of USDC in circulation on 28 September, $46.7 billion was on Ethereum, about 62 percent, according to DefiLlama. Hyperliquid, Solana and Base held another $19 billion between them. Arc, twelve days old, held about $460 million, or 0.6 percent. That is the gap the exchange lineup is meant to close. An exchange that supports both Ethereum and Arc works as a bridge with a balance sheet behind it: a customer deposits USDC on one network and withdraws it on the other, with no wrapped token in between.
KuCoin, Emerging Markets and the Case for Direct Transfers
KuCoin's own growth maps closely onto the users a dollar chain is built for. The exchange passed 45 million users in more than 200 countries and regions in July. In the first half of 2026 its new-user numbers grew 170 percent in Latin America and 30 percent in Africa. Those are the regions where stablecoins often do the job of a bank account. Chainalysis found that in the year to June 2025 stablecoins made up more than half of all exchange purchases in Argentine pesos, Brazilian reais and Colombian pesos. Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion on chain over the same period, up about 52 percent, with stablecoins carrying much of the trade between Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
For a KuCoin user in Buenos Aires or Lagos, direct support changes what a withdrawal needs and how long it takes to count. Sending USDC out over Ethereum means paying the network fee in ether; the transfer takes about 15 minutes to finalise. Over Solana the fee is paid in SOL and finality takes about 12.8 seconds. On Arc the fee is paid in USDC and the transfer is final in under 350 milliseconds. A user who holds only dollars can send only dollars, which removes the step where a first-time user has to buy a second token just to move the first.
Payments are where KuCoin's plans meet Arc's. In the first half of 2026 KuCoin Pay, the exchange's merchant payments service, more than tripled its off-chain payment volume, grew total orders about 25 times and added 60 percent more merchants and service partners. KuCoin also launched its KuCard in Australia on Mastercard's network, the same Mastercard that now signs Arc's blocks. A payments business built on digital dollars has an obvious use for a chain where the fee is in dollars and settlement is final in under a second.
Regulation is the other half of access. KuCoin's European arm won a MiCA licence from Austria's Financial Market Authority in November 2025, covering 29 countries in the European Economic Area. It registered with Australia's AUSTRAC the same month. Under MiCA, exchanges serving European customers can offer only stablecoins from authorised issuers. Circle became the first global issuer to comply in July 2024 and both USDC and EURC run on Arc. For an institution, being able to reach Arc starts with those three pieces: a licensed venue, a compliant token and a chain that settles it.
Twelve Days In: Where Arc's Dollars Went
Arc's launch week was loud. Launchpads accounted for most of the first day's trading and 97,000 tokens were created in the first 24 hours, according to Whales Market. Twelve days on, the data describes a calmer and more useful network. Stablecoins on Arc peaked at $649 million on 17 September and eased to about $460 million by 27 September, according to DefiLlama, with most of the fall coming between 24 and 26 September as launch-week trading money moved on. Total value locked moved the other way over the same ten days, from $334 million to $520 million, a rise of 56 percent.
The growth has come almost entirely from the lending markets. By 28 September Morpho Blue held $288 million and Aave V4 $185 million, up from $181 million and $127 million on 18 September, a combined rise of 53 percent. The two markets still hold about 91 percent of the chain's locked value, the same share as ten days earlier. Trading has settled into a steadier rhythm. Arc's decentralised exchanges handled $73 million in the 24 hours to 28 September and $393 million over the week, about $56 million a day. Users paid $820,583 in network fees that day, every cent of it in USDC, while $9.8 million of net inflows arrived on the chain.
Chart 5: Total value locked on Arc by protocol, 18 and 28 September 2026. Sources: DefiLlama; Whales Market.
The pieces for the business Arc was built for are also going into place. Circle says 22 stablecoins are live or onboarding to StableFX, from Brazil's BRLA to Japan's JPYC and Turkey's TRYB, with settlement costing a fraction of a cent. That is the multi-currency plumbing a remittance company like MoneyGram or a card network like Visa would need before sending real payments through the chain. Whether they do is not yet visible in public data. BlackRock's BUIDL fund is still to arrive. DTCC's tokenised securities are due in the second half of 2027.
Twelve days is too soon to judge a payments chain. The early numbers still point the right way for one built like this: dollars arrived through thirteen exchanges on the first day, the launch-week froth has cleared and the lending base has grown by half. The next two quarters will show whether Visa, Mastercard, MoneyGram and Worldpay send payments through the blocks they sign, whether BUIDL and DTCC's tokenised securities arrive on schedule and whether exchanges such as KuCoin turn direct transfers into everyday use for the customers in Lagos and Buenos Aires who need dollars most. Thirteen exchanges have made it easy to get dollars onto Arc. Most of the dollars that stayed are now earning interest; the number worth watching is how many of them start paying for things.
Don’t forget to like and share the story!
Vested Interest Disclosure: HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR.