How Circle’s institutional Arc blockchain got taken over by memecoins on day one

Circle’s CRCL$82.66·Market Closed Arc blockchain went live Wednesday with BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard and DTCC among 11 founding validators, and CEO Jeremy Allaire calling it the most significant launch in the company’s history since $USDC itself.

The chain processed 7.83 million transactions in its first 24 hours, but almost none of it was payments. Lifetime $USDC transfers stand at about 624,000, according to Arc’s Blockscout explorer. Some 400,000 new accounts appeared in a day, and more than 73,000 contracts were deployed. Average fees quadrupled, to three cents.

Memecoins were filling the blocks, leading to some traders writing the chain off.

“Arc is one day old, and every coin is already down like 50-80%,” trader wale.moca posted on X. Asked whether it might recover, he replied: “It’s cooked.” Another user called it a one-day arc.

Memecoins prices on Arc are consistent with the negative sentiment, with TOLLY down 56%, LONG 77%, COOL 75% from launch highs.

Day-one DEX volume on Arc finished at around $82 million, compared with the $878 million Robinhood Chain did on July 12, when its own institutional pitch was overtaken by memecoins and a cat token briefly hit a $156 million market cap. Arc’s largest token, ARGUS, is worth $16 million. Its second- and third-largest are cirBTC and EURC — Circle’s own products.

The sharper criticism is that Circle invited this. Rachel Mayer, Circle’s VP of product for Arc, posted an AI-generated image promoting DUKE, a memecoin, writing that it was Allaire’s dog. The post drew about 1 million views and a wave of hostile replies accusing Circle of shilling tokens to bootstrap its own network.

“You can clearly see a lot of their team fundamentally misunderstands meme culture,” wrote Abbas Khan. “Now it’s stuck in this weird middle ground where nobody really knows whether it’s supposed to be a meme chain or a corporate stablecoin chain.”

Circle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The chain itself is performing as designed, with half-second blocks being processed with no congestion, and DeFi platforms like Aave and Morpho live. But waning sentiment has led to feelings of frustration from the memecoin crowd, despite speculative token activity driving most of the day-one volume.