Circle’s CRCL$91.59·Market Closed Arc blockchain launched on Wednesday with BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, and the DTCC among its 11 foundational validators, while CEO Jeremy Allaire described it as the most pivotal debut for the firm since USDC itself.
During its initial 24 hours, the network handled 7.83 million transactions, yet practically none of those involved payments. Based on data from Arc’s Blockscout explorer, cumulative USDC transfers total roughly 624,000. Within a single day, around 400,000 fresh accounts emerged alongside over 73,000 deployed contracts, causing average transaction fees to quadruple to three cents.
As blocks filled up with speculative memecoins, certain market participants began dismissing the network entirely.
“Arc is one day old, and every coin is already down like 50-80%,” noted crypto trader wale.moca on X. When questioned about a potential recovery, he answered, “It’s cooked.” Another participant labeled the project a one-day arc.
Reflecting this negative sentiment, memecoin prices on Arc dropped significantly, with TOLLY down 56%, LONG down 77%, and COOL down 75% relative to their initial peaks.
Total decentralized exchange volume on Arc during its first day closed at around $82 million, trailing far behind the $878 million recorded by Robinhood Chain on July 12 when its institutional marketing was likewise hijacked by memecoins alongside a cat-themed token briefly attaining a $156 million market valuation. At present, Arc’s premier token, ARGUS, holds a $16 million value, while its second and third largest tokens are cirBTC and EURC—both proprietary Circle offerings.
Heavier criticism centers on the notion that Circle encouraged this behavior. Rachel Mayer, Circle’s vice president of product for Arc, shared an AI-generated image advertising DUKE, a memecoin, claiming it represented Allaire’s dog. The publication gathered approximately one million views alongside numerous hostile responses claiming Circle was promoting tokens simply to bootstrap network activity.
“You can clearly see a lot of their team fundamentally misunderstands meme culture,” expressed Abbas Khan. “Now it’s stuck in this weird middle ground where nobody really knows whether it’s supposed to be a meme chain or a corporate stablecoin chain.”
Circle did not offer an immediate reply to inquiries for comment.
Technically, the network operates exactly as intended, maintaining half-second block production times free of congestion while decentralized finance protocols such as Aave and Morpho remain active. Nonetheless, declining sentiment has generated disappointment among speculative memecoin participants, despite transactional volume on day one being primarily propelled by speculative token trading.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/09/17/circle-launched-a-corporate-l2-backed-by-blackrock-but-traders-immediately-turned-it-into-a-memecoin-casino.
