Arc blockchain arrived with an unusually serious guest list. Built by Circle, the company behind USDC, the new Layer 1 was designed for financial markets, real-time payments and transactions carried out by both people and software agents.
On its first public-mainnet day, however, the biggest numbers came from somewhere much less institutional: memecoin launchpads.
Those launchpads generated about $336.26 million of the $410.8 million in decentralized exchange volume recorded across the network on September 16, according to Dune data compiled by analyst Adam. That puts them at roughly 82% of all first-day DEX trading.
Circle had positioned Arc as an “economic operating system” for the internet. Traders, at least initially, had other plans.
More than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders had already deployed on or tested Arc’s private mainnet before the public launch. The network’s founding validator group includes BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC and ICE.
Asset managers were also preparing to bring traditional financial products onchain. Bitwise, BlackRock and Janus Henderson were moving tokenized funds onto Arc, while Visa and MoneyGram planned to use the network for stablecoin settlement.
Trading platforms were arriving too. Uniswap, Robinhood and Pump.fun were expanding into spot, perpetual and cross-chain markets on the chain.
“Today we are switching on something the world has never had before: an open, neutral, always-on economic operating system for the internet, secured by some of the most important financial institutions on Earth, and built for a world where both people and machines transact,” Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Circle, said.
Arc Has Institutions on the Validator List. Meme Traders Had the Volume.
Arguspad was responsible for $202.35 million of launchpad trading during the first 24 hours, making it the clear center of the activity.
Minara.fun added another $36.41 million, while Tollylabs accounted for $19.65 million. Together, the figures show just how heavily day-one trading leaned toward speculative token launches rather than the institutional use cases Circle emphasized.
The token creation numbers tell a similar story. Arguspad minted 83,751 tokens in 24 hours, representing more than 86% of all tokens created on the network during that period.
Across Arc, traders created 97,025 tokens and pushed 7.76 million transactions through the chain on September 16.
The scale was notable enough to invite an immediate comparison with Robinhood Chain, which launched on July 1. Its own first day recorded $14.74 million in volume.
Arc’s debut was nearly 28 times larger.
That comparison also comes with a built-in warning. Robinhood Chain’s activity cooled during August before reaching a daily record of $3.7 billion this month, showing how quickly an attention-heavy launch can change shape.
Arc now faces the same question, only with much larger numbers on the opening scoreboard: what happens after the novelty wears off?
The coming weeks will reveal whether institutional flows begin to define the chain’s activity, or whether launchpad-driven speculation remains the force setting its pace.