Circle built Arc for banks. The memecoins got there first...

Circle launched Arc on September 16 with an institutional pedigree few new blockchains can match. Its founding validator set includes BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC and ICE, and CEO Jeremy Allaire described the chain as a general-purpose economic operating system for payments, tokenized financial markets and AI-agent commerce. The network uses $USDC for gas and was designed around sub-second settlement for institutional users. Within hours of going live, retail traders had a very different idea.

Launchpads Take Over Day One

According to Dune on-chain data, @arc recorded $410.8M in total DEX volume and 7.76 million transactions on its first mainnet day. Memecoin launchpads drove roughly 82% of that activity, generating $336.26M of the total. @Arguspad led the pack by a wide margin, handling $202.35M alone. Minara.fun followed with $36.41M and Tollylabs with $19.65M, according to BeInCrypto. Activity spanned 19 launchpads in total, though volume thinned sharply after the top five.

The token creation numbers were equally striking. Traders minted 97,025 new tokens on Arc on day one. @Arguspad was responsible for 83,751 of them, more than 86% of every token created on the chain, and more single-day token launches than pump.fun has ever recorded in a 24-hour period.

The top five @Arguspad tokens by market cap and 24-hour volume at the time of reporting:

ARGUS: $17.5M market cap / $3.63M volume
UpSideDownCat (USDC): $2M / $1.79M
The Duke of Arc (DUKE): $1.43M / $1.09M
PI: $570K / $521K
FatCatBatRatWifHat (USDC): $332K / $406K

A Pattern That Has Played Out Before

The dynamic is not without precedent. Robinhood Chain launched in July 2026 with a similar institutional pitch around tokenized stocks, then saw retail speculation dominate its early weeks before real-world asset value began building in earnest. Strip the launchpad activity out of Arc's day-one numbers and the remaining volume, tied to USDC settlement, tokenized collateral and institutional payment rails, comes to around $74.6M. That is the baseline Circle built the chain for. Whether speculative volume gives way to institutional adoption, as it eventually did on Robinhood Chain, remains the central question heading into Arc's first weeks of mainnet life.

NFA, DYOR.

Sources:
BeInCrypto: Meme Coin Launchpads Captured 82% of Arc's First Day Trading Volume
Circle: Arc Mainnet Launch Press Release
CoinDesk: How Circle's Institutional Arc Blockchain Got Taken Over by Memecoins on Day One