BlockBeats news: On May 11, Circle officially released the ARC whitepaper, outlining the design framework for ARC as the native coordinating asset of the Arc blockchain network.
Arc is a public Layer 1 blockchain positioned as the "Economic OS of the Internet," providing shared, composable infrastructure to support economic contracts, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and global markets.
ARC is the utility-native asset of the Arc network, aligning participants with the network’s long-term success through staking, governance, fee capture, and platform-level utility functions. ARC does not represent any equity, debt, income right, or claim on Circle’s assets; its economic value derives entirely from interactions with the Arc network. ARC serves five core structural functions: economic alignment (staking and security), platform utility (discounts and priority access), fee capture and distribution, governance, and expanding utility as the platform grows.
· Supply and Inflation: The initial supply of ARC is 10 billion tokens. An early-adopter decay-based inflation model is employed (projected initial annual rate of 2-3%) to reward validators and stakers. The long-term goal is to achieve "inflation neutrality" by fully offsetting new issuance through network-driven token burns.
Fee Conversion: Regardless of the asset (e.g., USDC) users pay protocol fees in, the fees will be programmatically converted to ARC at the protocol level and split into two parts: one portion allocated to validators and stakers as compensation, and the other permanently burned to offset inflation.
· Allocation Plan: 60% allocated to the ecosystem (token sales, developer grants, network growth); 25% allocated to Circle (protocol development, staking, and governance); 15% allocated to long-term reserves (strategic flexibility and economic stability).
In terms of governance, after the Arc upgrade to a PoS mechanism, economic parameters (fees, inflation, and burn logic) are determined by ARC stakers through governance voting. Initially, Circle is responsible for protocol upgrades, security incident response, and validator membership management, with governance gradually transitioning to token holders as the network matures.
The Arc public testnet launched in October 2025 and has processed 244.1 million transactions as of May 5, 2026. The mainnet is expected to launch in summer 2026.