As Circle’s stablecoin blockchain, Arc, prepares to launch, cross-chain tutorials are flooding social media. Users are already doing their homework: how to transfer USDC onto Arc, which launchpad to watch, and who will become the first golden dog on the new chain.
Circle’s brand appeal, the early advantages of the new chain, combined with the previous wealth-creation myth of the Robinhood chain, are enough to fuel retail investors’ expectations for the launch. After going live, launchpads like Argus quickly became targets of capital pursuit, as everyone waited for the familiar script to play out once again.
Yet, just one day later, Arc’s meme market took on a grim, bloodbath-like atmosphere. Discussions shifted from seeking the leading meme to questioning whether the team even understood memes—and what else, if anything, remained playable on this chain.
What exactly is wrong with Arc?
Launchpad overflow
Before Arc launched, more than 50 launchpads had already been identified.
The new chain hasn’t had time to develop its own meme culture, and the launchpad spots are already taken.
This is easy to understand. The launchpad model is easy to replicate, enabling rapid creation of new assets and generating transaction fees. For developers, it’s more efficient to leverage a proven product rather than spend time experimenting with a new concept, allowing them to capture trading volume during chain launch.
But what’s good for developers isn’t necessarily good for retail investors.
Every platform wants to prove it’s the leader; every community wants to keep buying pressure on its own coin. With no consensus on the launchpad, liquidity is too fragmented.
Incompetent team
The launchpad siphoned away liquidity, and Arc team's poor marketing made it harder to build consensus.
Rachel Mayer from the Arc product team posted a photo of a dog with the caption, “The Duke of Arc has arrived,” followed by a note that this is reportedly the dog of Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire. In the image, the dog’s background and collar both feature Arc branding, making the implication obvious enough.
This approach certainly grabs the attention of new traders. However, the problem is that retail investors no longer respond to such blunt and direct trading signals.
Even the team’s live stream failed to improve perceptions. During the multi-person video call, Him joked: “Arc’s livestream is more intimidating than a Fed interest rate meeting.” While these jokes based on appearance and visual style don’t prove any issues with the team, they indicate that the trust the team hoped to build never reached this audience.
The meme community amplifies details and also mocks deliberate marketing. Rigid pump messages, conflicting hints, combined with an unappealing live streaming experience, ultimately led to the perception that "the team simply doesn't understand memes."
Arc originally had a clear positioning as a stablecoin chain, but now finds itself stuck between enterprise finance and meme hype. He questions whether the team simply saw that Robinhood succeeded and decided to copy it, without understanding why that approach worked in the first place.
This is also a more difficult problem for Arc to solve.
Copied the strategy, but not the buyers.
A large part of Robinhood's appeal comes from its role as a retail trading gateway. For on-chain participants, the hype around Robinhood is essentially a bet on the future influx of retail traders into the on-chain space.
Circle possesses a different advantage: USDC, payment networks, and institutional clients can support settlement and financial applications, but have nothing to do with memes. The needs of businesses using stablecoins are vastly different from those of retail traders willing to repeatedly trade on cats and dogs.
Arc was not unprepared. Unipcs acknowledged its integration with tools like FOMO and DexScreener at launch, even calling it one of the best-executed blockchain launches recently. He had little interest in Arc before, but changed his view upon learning that FOMO would be integrating with Arc.
But he also repeatedly emphasized that he views Arc as a short-term opportunity to enter and exit within days, because why would traders stay here indefinitely?
Arc's initial offerings to retail investors resemble Robinhood too closely. The true features unique to Arc have not yet become the focus of this meme-driven rally.
Arc's own story
Arc's advantage over other chains lies in its additional capabilities built around stablecoin finance.
For example, foreign exchange. According to Bankless, StableFX connects USDC with various local stablecoins. Building on this idea, Arc’s future memes could experiment with pairing different local stablecoins, creating connections between local currencies, communities, and their familiar cultural symbols.
Privacy is also a focus. Circle plans to develop optional privacy features that protect balances and transaction details using trusted execution environments, while allowing selective information disclosure.
If implemented, this capability would allow developers to design gameplay around mechanisms such as anonymous identities and selective disclosure of holdings, transforming the way interactions occur when all actions are exposed on a public ledger.
Agents could also reclaim the spotlight. Arc’s Agent Stack provides agents with policy-governed wallets and the infrastructure for discovery and payment services. The Arc team is continuously researching verifiable identity, history, reputation, and credit. Perhaps Arc can make the agent narrative great again.
Circle’s reputation is enough to attract traders, but that’s not enough. Now, Arc must deliver its own value.