@arc mainnet is live today, $USDC as native gas. Congratulations to @circle and Arc, to all their teams, and to everyone who has contributed from the very beginning, it’s an incredible day. Most of what gets written in the next 24h will be interchangeable throughput numbers. Here is the one structural change worth a treasurer's attention, then the honest list of what it doesn't touch. On essentially every other chain you pay to move money in an asset that is not the money you're moving. Send $100, and you must also hold a separate volatile asset to pay the fee, in an amount nobody can quote you in advance, priced in a market with nothing to do with your payment. Second inventory, second price to hedge, second accounting treatment, and a cost line you can't state in the transaction's currency. We normalised that so completely it stopped being visible. Said plainly it's strange: a bank transfer where the fee is paid in a commodity whose price moves while you're paying it. Same unit for gas and payment and that disappears. Not because the fee is smaller. Because the two become commensurable. One unit, one number, one line, and a landed cost you can quote before the money moves. Now the part that's least convenient today. Faster settlement does not make a counterparty identifiable. The chain records the transaction, not the parties. Whoever your software is about to pay is exactly as unverified as yesterday, and the platform terms across this stack say so in writing. Cheaper settlement does not create recourse. Irreversible transfer, correct address, goods never arrive: completed payment, commercial loss. And mainnet doesn't mean safe. It means the opposite of testnet. Mistakes cost money now. That's the point and it's the risk. So, plainly: today a lot of people will say they're live 🥂 @Meridian_Fi runs on Arc testnet, end to end, whole loop. Mainnet with real funds comes after a security audit, the Launch coming soon, because publishing one creates pressure to meet it. That sentence has been at the bottom of every piece I've written for weeks. Today it goes in the middle. Three differences worth stating as facts rather than adjectives. The unit: ETH on Ethereum, SOL on Solana, USDC on both sides here. No wrapper either, no WUSDC, because there is nothing to wrap. Finality: ~12-13 minutes of economic finality on Ethereum, versus final once the block is committed, so applications can drop confirmation counters and reorg rollback paths. The issuer: Circle, USDC reserves sit in cash and short-dated Treasuries, attested monthly, and since 10 July under an OCC-supervised national trust bank. EURC is MiCA-authorised. Tether has not sought MiCA authorisation, which is why EU-regulated venues delisted USDT. And the boundary, because today is the wrong day to be loose: none of that is a throughput claim, and none of it makes the network decentralised. Arc runs a permissioned validator set and says so itself. #USDC #Stablecoins #Payments #ArcMainnet