Circle, the issuer of USDC▼$0.9997, has unveiled ARC whitepaper, positioning the ARC token to sit inside fees, staking, governance and future platform access.
Circle, the issuer of USDC, has released the Arc whitepaper, giving the clearest look at how ARC, the native token of its planned blockchain, is supposed to work.
Arc is expected to launch its mainnet this summer after its public testnet, live since October 2025, processed 244.1 million transactions as of May 5, according to the whitepaper.
Read also: Circle Open Sourcing Arc to Outside Hackers Ahead of Mainnet Launch
The design of Arc fees will allow users to pay the fees by looking up at the price in dollars rather than having to speculate on how much gas would cost using a highly volatile token. Even then, these fees will need to be paid in ARC once they have been processed at the protocol level
From there, a portion of ARC will go to validators and stakers, whereas another portion of the ARC will be burnt, taking them out of the circulation.
ARC Tokenomics Details
The initial circulating supply of the ARC token will be ten billion. Out of the total supply, Circle is planning to allocate 60% to the ecosystem and 25% to themselves, leaving 15% for the reserve account.
At launch, ARC issuance is expected to start at roughly 2% to 3% a year under a decaying inflation model.
Circle reassured though that “the long-term objective is inflation neutrality,” noting, however, that this transition “is not guaranteed by a fixed timeline.”
The whitepaper follows Circle’s May 11 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where the firm said that it had reached an agreement to sell 740 million ARC tokens to institutional investors at $0.30 per token, representing a total valuation of $3 billion.
Read more: Circle CEO Sees “Huge Opportunities” in Chinese Yuan-Pegged Stablecoin
