Arc is Circle’s open, EVM-compatible Layer-1 — an economic OS for the internet. USDC pays for gas, fees are quoted in dollars, and every block is final in under a second.
00Live from Arc
Not a mock-up. These are read from an Arc node every few seconds: the block being agreed, the fee it charges in dollars, and the traffic it carries.
Each bar is a block. The newest is being voted on; once more than two-thirds of validators commit it, it is final. There is no confirmation depth to wait out.
Where the fee sits between Arc's floor and its hard ceiling. It moves in small steps, following a moving average of demand.
Transactions in each block sampled since you opened this page. It fills in as you watch.
Published figure until the first sample arrives.
Deterministic. A block is either unconfirmed or final — never probably final.
Gas on Arc is paid in USDC, so the fee is already a dollar amount. No second token, no conversion.
Awaiting a live sample — showing the design target Arc publishes. Arc's base fee is not burned; it is credited to the block's beneficiary with the tip.
01What is Arc
Arc is an open, EVM-compatible blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin finance: payments, FX, treasury, capital markets, lending and agentic commerce. Solidity and the usual Ethereum tools work as they are.
General-purpose chains price blockspace in a volatile asset and settle probabilistically — workable for speculation, awkward for money. Arc starts from the other end: what does a payment need from a ledger?
There is no volatile gas token. USDC pays every fee, fees are quoted in dollars and smoothed against demand, and EURC and USYC are supported at the protocol level.
A committed block cannot be reorganised. Settlement is deterministic, sub-second and auditable — the assurance regulated institutions expect from payment and clearing systems.
02How it works
Arc separates agreeing on order from applying changes. Each layer is tuned on its own; together a transaction goes from submission to final state in under a second.
Consensus · Malachite BFT
Orders and finalises blocks across a permissioned validator set. A block is final the moment it commits.
Execution · Reth, EVM (Osaka)
Runs Solidity contracts and keeps state. Every USDC movement emits a standard Transfer log (EIP-7708).
USDC as gas · Fee Manager
Fees are paid and quoted in USDC, and the base fee follows a moving average of demand so it stays easy to estimate.
Interoperability · CCTP and Gateway
Native links to Circle’s platform for moving USDC between chains, and App Kits for payment and liquidity flows.
03Finality
On most networks a payment is only probably settled until enough blocks pile on top of it. On Arc a transaction is either unconfirmed or final — nothing in between.
Withdrawal finality waits on the challenge or proof window.
Two epochs of attestations.
Deterministic. Final on commit.
Bars are drawn on a logarithmic scale. Comparison as published in Arc’s documentation; rollup withdrawal finality depends on each rollup’s challenge or proof window.
04Malachite BFT
Arc separates agreeing on order from applying changes. Malachite, a Tendermint-style consensus engine, orders and finalises blocks; Reth, a Rust Ethereum client, runs the EVM.
Every block goes through two rounds of voting. Once more than two-thirds of validators pre-commit the same block, it is appended and every transaction in it is final — there is no longer chain that could replace it.
That is what deterministic finality means in practice: no confirmation counts, no reorg handling, no waiting to be sure. An application can act the moment a block commits.
Simplified from Arc’s documentation. Each layer — consensus and execution — is tuned on its own.
All four rounds, then execution and a new state root — in under a second.
05Capacity
A block roughly every half second, each with room for 30 million gas. Arc tunes consensus and execution separately, so neither one sets the pace for the other.
Illustrative — each cell is one block’s worth of capacity
3,000+
Transactions a second, benchmarked
With 20 validators, finalising in under 350 ms.
~0.48s
Per block · 30M gas
Faster than the roughly half-second it takes to blink.
Figures from Arc’s published benchmark and protocol parameters — a measured result, not a promise of sustained throughput, which varies with conditions.
06Stable fees
Gas on Arc is paid in USDC, so a fee is already a dollar amount. And it is smoothed, so a burst of demand does not become a price shock — a business can quote a cost up front and reconcile it without converting anything.
~$0.001
Per transfer · Arc’s design target
Each dot is one transfer
Minimum base fee
20 gwei
Maximum base fee
20,000 gwei
Base fee
Not burned
Arc builds on EIP-1559, but steers the base fee by an exponentially weighted moving average of how full blocks are. Drag the demand spike and compare the two rules.
Parameters as published for Arc; they may be adjusted. The base fee is credited to the block’s beneficiary along with the tip. The chart is a simplified model of the two rules, not network data.
07Validators
Arc’s validators are a known set of regulated institutions — the assurance payment and clearing systems expect. Everything above consensus is permissionless: anyone can deploy contracts and send transactions.
A known validator set is what lets a committed block be final and auditable. Settlement is provable after the fact, and nobody has to trust an anonymous majority to keep behaving.
Commit threshold: more than two-thirds of validators. The benchmark figure is the validator count Arc published its performance results with.
08USDC as gas
There is no volatile native token on Arc. Every fee, native balance and native transfer is USDC — so you hold one asset for gas and for payments, with no second token to buy or watch.
Native USDC · 18 decimals
Pays gas and moves as msg.value. What eth_getBalance reports and native sends use.
ERC-20 USDC · 6 decimals
The standard token interface, for approvals and application transfers — no wrapper to deploy or trust.
Both faces share one balance. Every USDC movement also emits a standard Transfer log from a system address (EIP-7708), so indexers see native and ERC-20 transfers the same way.
Dials are illustrative: the same balance, read two ways. ERC-20 interface at 0x3600000000000000000000000000000000000000.
09Lifecycle
A signed transaction reaches an Arc node over JSON-RPC.
The node checks signature, balance and nonce, then holds it.
A rotating validator bundles pending transactions into a block.
Each validator checks the block and votes on its validity.
A second round: more than two-thirds must agree on the same block.
The block is appended. Every transaction in it is now irreversible.
Reth applies each transaction; the EVM and Arc’s modules run.
A Merkle root commits to the whole post-block state.
10Use cases
Every one of these needs the same three things: money that is native to the chain, fees you can predict, and settlement you never have to second-guess.
Global payments and payouts with near-instant settlement and dollar fees a sender can quote up front.
Around-the-clock exchange between stablecoins, with payment-versus-payment settlement.
Real-time stablecoin settlement, programmable disbursements and a live view of onchain cash.
Sub-second finality and stablecoin collateral for real-time risk and efficient use of capital.
Issue, manage and trade tokenized real-world assets that settle near-instantly and move across ecosystems.
Onchain credit markets with automated collateral logic and costs you can predict.
AI agents that hold identity, contract with each other and settle value in real time, under policy.
Low-cost person-to-person transfers in dollars that are final the moment they land.
Native gas and value
USDC
Euro stablecoin
EURC
Tokenized fund
USYC
Wrapped bitcoin
cirBTC
CCTP
Moves native USDC between chains by burning on one and minting on the other — no wrapped copies.
Gateway
USDC held across chains combined into one balance, spendable where it is needed.
App Kit
SDKs for bridge, swap, send, unified balance and onramp workflows in a few calls.
Use cases, assets and interoperability as described in Arc’s documentation. Asset availability is Arc’s and its issuers’, not ArcNet’s.
11Privacy and security
Planned
A confidential execution environment for Solidity contracts that runs alongside the public EVM and finalises in the same block.
Planned
Private and public contracts compose atomically. Nothing crosses a bridge, and nothing is exposed unless it is granted.
Live
Contracts on Arc can already verify SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s signatures — a hash-based scheme designed to resist quantum attacks.
Near-term
Hybrid post-quantum encryption to protect private state and node-to-node traffic.
Arc’s post-quantum roadmap
Source: Arc documentation. Roadmap items are Arc’s stated plans, not commitments by ArcNet.
12For developers
Arc targets the Osaka EVM baseline. Most Solidity contracts deploy unchanged with Foundry, Hardhat or viem — but a few runtime behaviours differ from Ethereum, and they matter wherever your code touches balances or fees.
import { defineChain } from 'viem';
export const arc = defineChain({
id: 5042,
name: 'Arc',
nativeCurrency: { name: 'USDC', symbol: 'USDC', decimals: 18 },
rpcUrls: { default: { http: ['https://rpc.mainnet.arc.io'] } },
blockExplorers: {
default: { name: 'Arc Explorer', url: 'https://explorer.arc.io' },
},
});What differs from Ethereum
USDC decimals
The native balance uses 18 decimals; the ERC-20 view uses 6. Same balance.
Transfer logs
Every USDC movement emits Transfer from a system emitter (EIP-7708) — index that, not the ERC-20 log alone.
Fee floor
maxFeePerGas must be at least 20 gwei or the mempool rejects it.
Value rules
Sends to address(0) revert; blocklisted transfers revert and still consume gas.
Confirmations
One. A committed block is final — no reorg handling needed.
Base fee
Not burned: credited to the block beneficiary along with the tip.
Source: Arc documentation (docs.arc.io). Always check Arc’s published contract addresses and endpoints before deploying.
13Questions
An invitation-only network. Members sign in with their wallet — no password, and nothing to pay to sign.
Network figures: docs.arc.io · www.arc.io