By the time you read this, Arc is hours away from going live.
And there is already way too much happening.
More than ten launchpads are fighting for the same liquidity, Fomo is preparing support, Banana Gun will be there from day one, OpenSea is opening the NFT market immediately, and dozens of tokens are already competing to become the first thing everyone associates with Arc.
Trying to follow all of it is probably the easiest way to miss the actual runner, so I’ve spent the last few days reducing Arc to the things I actually want in front of me when trading starts.
Starting with the obvious one:
Money.
Arc uses USDC as gas.
Circle built the chain around stablecoin settlement, so unlike most new-chain launches, there isn’t a separate native gas token you need to acquire before doing anything.
CCTP is the route I’m watching for native USDC. It burns USDC on the source chain and mints native USDC on Arc after Circle attests the transfer.
The community OFA bridge also uses Circle infrastructure, while Across and Jumper are worth checking once their Arc routes are actually live.
I wouldn’t overcomplicate this.
Send a small test transaction, confirm it arrives, then fund the wallet you’re actually trading with.
I’ve already seen people willing to pay absurd premiums simply to have Arc USDC before everyone else (I’m not doing that)
Being first is useless if being first costs you 50% before you’ve even made a trade.
Where I’ll be looking first
My first screen probably won’t be a chart.
It’ll be Fomo.
This is one of the reasons my view on Arc has become more interesting over the last few days.
Unipcs made a good observation: Fomo never rushed to integrate Hyperliquid, Tron or TON despite those ecosystems producing $100M+ runners.
Yet Arc is getting support almost immediately.
That doesn’t guarantee Arc becomes the next trenches.
It tells me people who understand where speculative volume goes are expecting enough activity to justify being there early.
Fomo gives me discovery.
Banana Gun could give me execution.
It has announced Day One Arc support, which means sniping and copy trading infrastructure should exist basically from the beginning.
And now Bubblemaps gives me another layer I didn’t have when I first started preparing this guide.
Arc has been added from Day One.
That means when some random token goes from $400K to $6M in an hour, I can immediately check whether the supply actually looks healthy or whether the “community” is one giant connected cluster.
The launchpad I want is the one producing the second winner
Arc already has ArcPad, Tolly, CircleWarp, Minara, Archemist, Flutch, Ubi, ACT, Akad, Zyora, Synthra, Flipt, Arcane, Sashimi, Eve, Lift, Foci, Ayoo and several others trying to capture launches.
I genuinely don’t care which one has the nicest website today.
I care about what happens once USDC starts moving.
The first runner will immediately send hundreds of traders toward whatever launchpad created it.
Then comes the important part.
What launches next?
If another token from the same platform runs, deployers notice.
Then more tokens launch there.
That’s when a launchpad stops being one of twenty competitors and starts becoming the place where everyone feels they have to look.
Pumpfun or Pons became important because traders believed the next runner could appear there.
I already have a starting board to look
I’m going into launch with a group of tokens already open rather than discovering everything after the first pump. I have no bags this is only information I have been checking. IT IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.
On the infrastructure/launchpad side:
0xbc43ce8dec648ea298c4275559b81d6261c90b67
0xece5ca8bf9220718e5727754026757512212cb3c
0x384c60f98ecd4c26345499345c03d677e40f115e
0x99b37b7fccaa7a1030617b6195eb3045c523bb97
0x0bffa97f774824e9da843699aedd2835cb1b8022
0x2164bb17a2d38c1b5170e987b2c0416df1efc752
0x11c87c506acf3ea0799f8717127fe55a184f8efd
$LONG is one I’ll be watching particularly closely.
Unipcs has already bought it and positioned in several of the biggest memes around its launchpad.
I’m not buying something because Unipcs bought it.
But one of the things I want to measure tomorrow is where experienced trenchers are actually choosing to deploy capital once Arc becomes public.
But I think people are underestimating Arc NFTs
This is the part I’ve been digging into more recently.
OpenSea is supporting Arc from Day One.
So Arc doesn’t have to spend its first month waiting for NFT infrastructure to exist.
Collections can mint and immediately have access to a marketplace traders already understand.
There are already enough projects competing for that “first Arc NFT” status that I think there is a completely separate speculative game developing here.
And I have three names above everything else.
@akadotfun is probably the WL I would want most.
AKA is playing with DN404, combining the NFT and token side rather than launching another isolated PFP.
The reported collection is 4,444 pieces, with 2,222 allocated around the mint/public process, and community reporting has already put WL registrations above 54K.
The numbers still need to be confirmed at mint, but the setup is easy to understand:
Arc + MemeFi + NFT/token hybrid.
That is exactly the kind of simple narrative that can spread quickly during a chain launch.
Then there is @ArclingsNFT.
Reported supply: 6,283.
1-bit SVG artwork.
Fully onchain.
This one interests me for almost the opposite reason.
If Arc survives and develops its own NFT culture, being one of the recognizable Day One fully-onchain collections can matter much more six months from now than it does tomorrow.
People love going back and buying the “early” artifacts of ecosystems after the ecosystem becomes valuable.
Arclings has a chance to fit that category.
And then I have @Orixaxyz.
Orixa is the one I’m watching beyond the mint itself because it’s building a curated Arc NFT marketplace and launchpad.
If Arc NFT volume actually appears, owning the JPEG is one trade.
Finding the infrastructure capturing all those launches is another.
That’s why Orixa makes my highest-priority group.
Then comes the PFP casino
This is where I’m much more selective.
@brokeb00kies has 4,444 pieces reported and is basically built for CT culture: trading, gambling, getting rekt and eight different character classes.
That can work.
@ARChitects_xyz is going directly after Arc-native identity with 6,666 reported pixel-art architects.
@Arcadiansnft_ has a reported 5,000 supply and sci-fi aesthetic. There has been talk of a ~$1 OpenSea mint, which would make it extremely accessible, but I want the final official details before treating that price as confirmed.
@KyneraOnArc is another early PFP candidate, although I’m waiting because public sources still disagree on whether the supply is closer to 6,000 or 10,000.
And one of the stranger ones is @machinesarc.
1,222 NFTs.
Instead of paying a normal mint price, you enter a raffle for 1 USDC per ticket.
If you lose, the entry is refunded.t.
There will be dozens of collections using “first on Arc” as marketing tomorrow.
Only a handful will still have volume once everyone stops caring about being first.
What would actually make me size into something?
I expect the first hours to be complete garbage.
Fake volume.
Bundled wallets.
Insiders.
None of that tells me where the actual runner is.
What gets my attention is when a token reaches a few million, sells off, and buyers keep coming back.
I want increasing unique holders.
I want liquidity growing with market cap.
And I want people outside the original Arc circle to start talking about it.
The best Day One trade might actually happen several hours after launch.
Because by then the market has already killed hundreds of candidates for you.
The same applies to NFTs.
Conclusion
Everyone wants to buy the token at $200K that eventually reaches $20M.
But at $200K, it probably looks like every other piece of shit launching next to it.
The information arrives as the market develops.
Maybe one launchpad suddenly owns most of the volume.
Maybe something that isn’t even on this list launches tomorrow and eats everything.
I don’t know.
That’s why this is a Day One guide instead of a list of “100x gems.”
From there, I’m letting the first few hours tell me where the money is actually going.
If the chain gets the speculative launch everyone is expecting, there will probably be a handful of tokens and collections that capture most of the attention.
Finding one of them early is enough.
StarPlatinum.
