Circle's Arc Debut Was Dominated by Meme Coin Launchpads
On Arc, speculative trading took over on day one: launchpads accounted for 82% of DEX volume. That runs counter to Circle's plan for USDC infrastructure and tokenized funds.
Key Takeaways
- Circle's Arc mainly attracted speculative trading on its first day, with meme coin launchpads accounting for 82% of the $410.8 million DEX volume.
- Arguspad was the biggest launchpad on Arc, with $202.35 million in volume and 83,751 minted tokens in 24 hours.
- Despite participation from major institutional players like BlackRock and Visa, fast crypto trading dominated on the public mainnet.
Circle's Arc mainly attracted speculative trading on the first day of its public mainnet. Meme coin launchpads accounted for about 82% of the $410.8 million (€356 million) in decentralized exchange volume that the network processed on its first day. That stands out because Circle positioned Arc as infrastructure for financial markets, real-time money movement, and economic activity by people and machines.
Launchpads Set the Tone
According to the on-chain data, $336.26 million (€291 million) of the day's volume came from launchpad tokens. Arguspad was by far the biggest player with $202.35 million (€175 million), followed by Minara.fun with $36.41 million (€31.6 million) and Tollylabs with $19.65 million (€17 million). Arguspad also minted 83,751 tokens in 24 hours, accounting for more than 86% of all tokens created on the chain.
In total, 97,025 tokens were minted and 7.76 million transactions were processed on September 16. That gave Arc a very busy first day right away, but with a clear focus on fast, speculative trading instead of the institutional use case Circle had highlighted beforehand.
Institutional Players Are Present Too
Arc is an open Layer 1 network from Circle, the issuer of USDC. The network launched on September 16, 2026, and has a validator set that includes BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, and ICE. More than 100 institutional and ecosystem players had also already tested or built on the private mainnet before the public version went live.
In addition, asset managers such as Bitwise, BlackRock, and Janus Henderson are working on tokenized funds on the chain. Payment companies like Visa and MoneyGram want to run stablecoin settlement through Arc. At the same time, trading platforms like Uniswap, Robinhood, and Pump.fun joined with spot, perpetual, and cross-chain markets. That fits into a broader trend in which major financial firms are using blockchain infrastructure for tokenized assets and settlement, as the live test with tokenized securities at DTCC showed.
Why This Matters
For European crypto followers, this shows that a new network does not always get picked up right away by the user group it was built for. Even with a project backed by big names from traditional finance, the first activity can come mostly from the broader crypto market. That makes the coming weeks important, because they will show more clearly whether Arc mainly stays a place for launchpad trading or whether institutional activity starts to carry more weight.
