Odaily Planet Daily reports: Circle has released its latest whitepaper, “ARC: The Native Asset of the Economic OS,” officially launching the public Layer 1 network Arc and revealing for the first time the complete economic model of the native token, ARC. Arc is positioned as an “economic operating system for the internet,” designed to unify the underlying execution and coordination layer for stablecoin settlements, tokenized assets, and on-chain financial markets.
The Arc network will provide deterministic settlement, stablecoin-denominated gas fees, configurable privacy mechanisms, and an institutional-grade validator system, connecting to the broader financial ecosystem through USDC cross-chain (CCTP), payment networks, and developer tools. Since its testnet launched in October 2025, it has processed approximately 244 million transactions, with mainnet expected to launch in summer 2026.
The total supply of ARC is fixed at 10 billion tokens and serves as the native coordinating asset of the system, representing neither equity nor a claim to earnings. Its core functions include securing the network through staking, governing economic parameters, capturing fee value, and enabling cross-ecosystem coordination. Initially, 60% is allocated to ecosystem development and incentives, 25% to Circle for protocol development and operational support, and 15% as a long-term reserve to address systemic risks and strategic expansion.
Economically, ARC employs an initial inflation rate of 2%–3%, gradually decreasing as the network matures, with a long-term goal of approaching neutral inflation. Meanwhile, Arc has designed a unified fee model: regardless of which asset users pay network fees with, the system automatically converts all fees into ARC at the protocol level, distributing them among validators and stakers, while permanently burning a portion of ARC to create a “use-and-burn” supply-and-demand structure.
This mechanism gives ARC dual value drivers: on one hand, growth in network usage will continuously increase demand for ARC; on the other hand, the fee burn mechanism will continuously reduce the circulating supply. The whitepaper explicitly states that the long-term goal is to achieve a scale of protocol fee burns that approaches or even offsets new issuance, thereby establishing an economically neutral or deflationary structure.
At the functional level, ARC serves multiple roles including staking security, governance voting, fee discounts, and cross-ecosystem权益 access. Stakers receive network yield distributions and fee incentives, and participate in deciding key parameters such as fee structures, inflation curves, and burn ratios. Initially governed by Circle, the governance structure will gradually transition to validators and token holders, ultimately achieving decentralized management of economic parameters.
Circle emphasizes in its whitepaper that ARC is not an investment asset in the traditional sense, but rather a foundational mechanism for coordinating the global economic operating system, with its value derived from network usage itself rather than any issuer promise. Amid the rapid expansion of stablecoins, RWA, and on-chain finance, Arc aims to elevate blockchain from a “platform for financial applications” to a “global economic settlement layer,” with ARC serving as the core coordination and value-capture tool within this system.