Arc mainnet goes live on September 16.
And judging by my timeline, half of CT has already decided this is going to be Robinhood trenches 2.0.
I’m not completely convinced.
Robinhood had a very specific retail distribution machine behind it, while Arc is being built by Circle primarily for USDC, payments, FX and tokenized finance. But that doesn’t mean the speculative side won’t explode anyway.
There are already more than ten launchpads fighting for liquidity, trading terminals preparing day-one support, memes trading before public mainnet, stock-paired tokens, cashback coins, NFT collections and people paying stupid premiums just to get USDC onto Arc early.
That’s the kind of environment where someone turns $1,000 into $100,000.
(also the kind of environment where someone turns $100,000 into $1,000 btw)
But let´s start your introduction to Arc, this is NOT financial advice, Yes i will share tickers, but I don´t have any bags atm, I´m just watching, same reason why I´m sharing this:
This is informational content, there is no financial advice, DYOR
First: get your USDC onto Arc without getting farmed
This is probably more important than finding the next meme.
Arc uses USDC as gas, which means the asset you’re bridging is also the asset you need to transact.
Circle’s main infrastructure here is CCTP.
Instead of locking USDC somewhere and giving you a wrapped version on Arc, CCTP uses a burn-and-mint model. Your USDC is burned on the source chain, Circle generates an attestation, and native USDC gets minted on Arc.
The flow is basically:
USDC on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum or another supported chain → burn → Circle attestation → native USDC minted on Arc.
If Circle’s official CCTP / Bridge Kit route is live when mainnet opens, that’s my default starting point.
There are other possibilities.
OFA Bridge has been built around CCTP and Bridge Kit and includes things like automatic/manual bridging, retries and recovery using the burn hash.
Across could be interesting if Arc support actually goes live because intent-based bridges can be much faster for traders.
Jumper becomes useful if it aggregates several Arc routes and lets us compare cost and speed.
And then there’s CircleWarp, which is particularly interesting because it’s positioning itself as both a launchpad and an onboarding layer, with a curve and CCTP-based purchases from Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum.
Ofc we have seen FOMO supporting Arc since day 1 so you have another good point to enter.
If that works properly on mainnet, you could theoretically go from USDC elsewhere to buying an Arc launch without manually doing three separate steps.
Don’t pay 2x just because you want to be early
There’s already a market for pre-mainnet USDC.
And people are apparently paying close to $2 for every $1 of usable Arc USDC in some cases.
Think about what you’re doing there.
You’re basically buying USDC at a 100% premium and betting that whatever you buy afterwards immediately does more than a 2x just to recover the premium you paid to enter.
Could that work? Of course.
This is crypto.
But I’d rather have twice the balance ready on a liquid chain, wait for the proper bridge to open and compete for entries when real liquidity arrives.
Where I’m trading
There will be several ways to trade Arc from day one
Fomo is expected to support Arc from day one, which is important because Fomo already has KOLs, wallet tracking, copytrading behavior and an audience that naturally follows narratives.
That could have a huge impact on which Arc tokens receive attention.
But the claim circulating right now is that trading through Fomo can cost 5% per trade.
This is where Banana Gun gets interesting.
Banana has announced day-one Arc support and gives you the tools I actually care about for trenches trading: sniping, copy trading and limit orders.
The advertised fee is 1%, with cashback that can reach around 30% depending on the setup.
If those numbers hold at mainnet, execution through Banana could be dramatically cheaper than trading everything directly through Fomo.
Fomo could still be extremely important for discovery.
I just don’t necessarily want to pay the discovery tax every time I buy.
Then there’s Chart zone which already claims support across 10+ Arc launchpads.
That could become extremely useful because the first week is going to be fragmented as hell.
The launchpad war
Everybody wants to find the PONS of Arc before the market decides which platform it is.
Right now there are way too many candidates.
ArcPad, Tolly, CircleWarp, Minara, ArcDEXScan, Archemist, Flutch, Ubi, ACT, Akad, Zyora, Synthra, Flipt, Arcane, Sashimi, Eve, Lift, Foci, Ayoo and several others are all trying to capture some version of the same flow.
I don’t care who has the most followers before mainnet.
I care about what happens once money arrives.
The winning launchpad is probably going to reveal itself through a combination of launches, sustained volume, number of traders, liquidity retention, fees and actual runners.
If one platform produces three tokens that run from $100k to $5M while everything launched elsewhere dies at $80k, guess where the next developers are going to deploy.
TOLLY
TOLLY is one of the projects I have highest on my watchlist.
CA: 0xbc43ce8dec648ea298c4275559b81d6261c90b67
The current thesis is much broader than simply being another launchpad.
Tolly is positioning itself as a trading terminal, launchpad and onchain intelligence layer, while part of the fees reportedly go toward buybacks and burns.
Basically a PONS-inspired model with additional trading infrastructure attached.
The launchpad design shown in the Arc ecosystem material is also interesting: full supply goes into a locked USDC pool.
If Arc gets real volume, TOLLY gives you multiple ways for the thesis to work.
ARGUS
ARGUS is another launchpad/terminal play.
CA: 0xece5ca8bf9220718e5727754026757512212cb3c
Its launch model is being associated with 0% launch fees and Uniswap V4, and there has also been public interaction from people around the Arc ecosystem.
That doesn’t make ARGUS officially endorsed by Arc, obviously.
If it starts producing successful launches, the current size gives it much more room than a platform already valued at hundreds of millions.
Again, I’m buying the possibility that volume shows up, we will see.
WARP / CircleWarp
CA: 0x384c60f98ecd4c26345499345c03d677e40f115e
WARP might have one of the better product angles because it combines launch infrastructure with bridging.
The ecosystem sheet describes CircleWarp as using a curve and allowing CCTP purchases from Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum.
One of the biggest problems for every new blockchain is onboarding.
If WARP compresses that entire process, there’s a real UX advantage.
Mainnet will tell us very quickly whether the bridge + launchpad combination actually works.
SHARCFUN
CA: 0x99b37b7fccaa7a1030617b6195eb3045c523bb97
Sharc is going after a different angle.
The interesting claim here is that 50% of launchpad fees are distributed to SHARCFUN holders.
ARCASH
CA: 0x0bffa97f774824e9da843699aedd2835cb1b8022
ARCASH is another fee-distribution experiment.
The concept has been compared to IndexFi, with 3% of token swap fees reportedly flowing back toward holders.
That gives the token an interesting reflexive structure if Arc trading explodes.
People speculate on Arc tokens → swaps generate fees → ARCASH holders receive part of those fees → attention moves toward ARCASH → more volume.
The danger is pretty obvious.
If nobody trades, there’s nothing interesting to distribute.
LONG
CA: 0x2164bb17a2d38c1b5170e987b2c0416df1efc752
LONG is trying to replicate the stock-paired model we already saw work elsewhere.
Memecoins paired with tokenized stocks.
Attach a token to NVIDIA, AMC, Tesla or whatever stock everyone is talking about and the narrative already exists.
If Arc actually becomes a financial chain with tokenized equities and USDC-native trading, LONG is at least directionally aligned with what the network itself is trying to become.
BRC
CA: 0x11c87c506acf3ea0799f8717127fe55a184f8efd
BRC is more of an OG infrastructure trade.
It comes from BRC Exchange, launched by Noxa Fi, and is being positioned as one of the older DEX-related tokens in the ecosystem.
The memes
Of course none of this matters if Arc launches and everyone decides the only thing they want to buy is a picture of a cat.
Which is completely possible.
And there are already a few narratives worth knowing before mainnet.
COOL
CA: 0xeb64987643db71c76b2a2be7e723decc995e5b37
COOL is probably the most obvious Arc meme right now.
The narrative is basically USDC/Circle culture, and the token received a public response from the official USDC account.
Again, that is not an endorsement.
But If Arc gets a meme season, I expect COOL to be one of the first charts people open.
ARCAT
CA: 0x07704b06981ea962b87296362a1281484d160000
It claims to be the first token ever deployed on Arc.
If Arc culture forms around its earliest tokens, ARCAT has a very simple story to tell.
ARCANINE
CA: 0xf3715bf5c2de299f08b81180ffb739a8372a175f
ARCANINE has a slightly different historical claim.
ARCAT may have been deployed first, but ARCANINE is described as the first Arc token to actually trade publicly, because some earlier deployments had no liquidity.
ARCHITECTS
CA: 0x8bcb94279fc2c984ec34e0c1f2192df8c69ea4f0
ARCHITECTS is built around Arc’s early core community and the people who have been calling themselves architects.
It is not officially affiliated with Arc btw.
STEVE
CA: 0xa23632d6a32174ff4ee8e76aacf9f244e10cfd73
STEVE comes from an actual Circle narrative.
Circle introduced Steve, an AI agent built to trade prediction markets.
Someone naturally turned it into a memecoin.
BEANCAT
CA: 0x41c8a71f630c636294009fa4fb0cc4c3bbe674fe
This one might have my favorite origin story.
Apparently the @arc profile belonged to a Japanese user back in 2012 who had a cat as their profile picture.
Crypto found the old account history.
Now we have BEANCAT.
ACAT
CA: 0xf80457274fa646c7a8e0942d48be703864ef3d01
ACAT is interesting mainly because it was the first and currently largest launch from the o1 factory according to the material circulating around Arc.
BARC
CA: 0x4753c45fb550fecaa143a47968659117e6ffc2ce
BARC has the same angle for TradePools.
First launch from the platform.
If TradePools becomes relevant, BARC gains historical importance.
If TradePools disappears, nobody cares that it was first.
Simple enough.
How I’m finding the launchpad winner
I wouldn’t try to predict this purely before launch.
I’d create a scoreboard and update it constantly during the first 24-72 hours.
For every launchpad I want to know the number of launches, total volume, unique traders, fees, average liquidity at launch, how many tokens survive beyond one hour, how many survive beyond 24 hours and which platform produces the first genuine runner.
One $50M runner changes the perception of an entire platform.
That’s what happened with launchpads on every other successful trenches chain.
The moment traders associate a venue with winners, they start waiting there for the next one.
The first 72 hours
I expect the first few hours to be completely chaotic.
By the end of day one, we should begin seeing which DEX has the deepest liquidity, which launchpad is attracting serious deployers, whether Fomo’s audience is moving markets and which early memes actually survive their first selloff.
By day three, I want to see capital entering Arc rather than simply rotating between the same 500 wallets.
Final thoughts
There are going to be two Arc launches happening at the same time.
Circle is launching a serious financial network with USDC as gas, institutional validators, CCTP, Aave, Morpho, Uniswap, Aerodrome, Chainlink and infrastructure aimed at stablecoins, payments and tokenized assets.
CT is launching a casino on top of it.
I’m interested in the second one.
The goal isn’t to buy every ticker mentioned in this guide, please don´t do that, use this as a list of things to check before the 16th so you can be ready.
Again I don´t have a bag of any of this, I will personally wait to see what happens on day 1.
Your first Arc 100x probably won’t look obvious before it happens.
But at least now you’ll know where to look.
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StarPlatinum.
