A month after launch, Arc lost 94% of its daily users. Its lending market filled up

01 · Launch dayA crowd for a new kind of chain

In mid-September, Circle opened its own blockchain to everyone. Circle is the company that issues USDC, a digital dollar. Its new chain is called Arc. On the first day, hundreds of thousands of wallets used it.

They came for everything at once, as our launch-day study found. People bridged in dollars, launched tokens by the tens of thousands, and traded them within minutes. Arc charges its network fees in USDC instead of a separate coin, and on that first day users paid more in fees than in the next six days combined.

A month later, almost all of that crowd is gone. Bitquery indexes every block on Arc, so we followed every transaction from launch to 14 October. The month splits in two. Retail use fell 94% from launch day to the fourth week. One market grew the whole time: lending, where traders borrowed USDC against Circle's own tokenized bitcoin. Between the two sits a thick layer of wallet farms, where one person creates thousands of addresses, and trading bots. Both make the chain look busier than it is. We separate them out, then follow the money to see who holds it and where it goes.

02 · What Arc isA chain built around one company's dollar

Most blockchains have their own coin, and you need some of it to pay fees. Arc does not. Fees are paid in USDC, so anyone holding dollars on Arc can use it straight away. Circle creates USDC on Arc when someone deposits dollars with it and destroys it when they are redeemed, so the total on the chain moves with real deposits.

Money also arrives through bridges, services that move USDC from another blockchain by destroying it there and creating it here. Circle runs two of them, CCTP and Gateway. On top of the chain sit the usual apps. Exchanges let tokens trade against USDC, and launchpads let anyone create a token in one click. Morpho, a lending app, lets you post one asset as collateral and borrow another.

Circle also issues a tokenized bitcoin on Arc, cirBTC, alongside its euro coin EURC. Those two and USDC are the assets that matter here. Many other "stablecoins" and "stock tokens" on Arc turned out to be copies: 1,451 contracts other than Circle's call themselves USDC.

03 · The crowd94% gone, and many were never people

Every measure of use peaked on the first day. Active wallets fell by half on day two and kept sliding. Of the wallets that first appeared on launch day, about one in thirty was still active in the last week.

The crowd left; the bots stayedArc, wallets per day, 16 Sep to 14 Oct 2026

Part of the first-day crowd was never a crowd. A wallet needs a little USDC to pay its first network fee, its gas, so we traced who paid for each new wallet's first transaction. Forty-two senders each paid for 1,000 or more brand-new wallets, almost always with less than a dollar apiece. That is the signature of a wallet farm: one person creating thousands of addresses to look like thousands of users, usually to qualify for a future reward. We have seen the same pattern in airdrop farming on other chains.

A third of new wallets came from 42 farms1,052,410 wallets created after launch, by who paid their first gas

At the other end sit the bots. About fifteen hundred wallets sent thousands of transactions each, and by the last week they sent four in five of all transactions on Arc. Set them aside, along with the farms and one outsized trader. What remains is the teal line in the first chart, a real crowd that shrank about as fast as the headline one.

04 · TradingVolume held up because of a few wallets

Daily trading volume did not fall with the user count. It held up for most of the month, while nine in ten traders left. That gap is a handful of wallets.

Headline volume held up; real volume did notArc DEX volume per day, USDC side of each swap

Two sources made 60% of the volumeshare of Arc's $2.84B DEX volume, 16 Sep to 14 Oct

The single largest trader is the wallet our earlier Arc investigation caught trading against itself. It kept going all month. In October it moved to copycat tokens that borrow real tickers, a fake cirBTC, a fake WETH and a fake EURC, and pushed hundreds of millions of dollars of volume through them. Any site that ranks tokens by symbol rather than by address would count that as real trading in those assets. The wallet paid about a hundred dollars in network fees for a billion dollars of volume.

The bot fleet is less hidden than it looks. A single transaction funded fifty of its wallets in one second on launch day. Another transaction, from a different wallet two hours earlier, funded forty-seven more, and some of those later sent their USDC back to it. Two funding wallets, in other words, seeded 97 of the 117 bots, and money has moved between the two groups.

05 · LaunchpadsA token factory that ran out of buyers

In launch week, one launchpad, Argus, created tens of thousands of tokens per day. By the last week it was making about a hundred. Only about three in ten of its tokens ever traded against USDC, and sixty-five creator wallets made more than half of all its launches between them.

The token factory ran drytokens launched on Argus per week, Arc

The question for anyone who bought is what the creators did next. We counted a creator sale whenever the wallet that launched a token sent that token out and received USDC back in the same transaction.

Creators sold into mid-size tokens mostshare of Argus tokens where the creator sold, by how many wallets traded the token

These are floors. A creator who sold through a second wallet is not counted, and the totals are gross: they do not subtract what a creator spent buying its own token at launch. A token that drew a few hundred buyers usually had a creator selling into them within the hour.

06 · The moneyWhere Arc's dollars came from, and who holds them

USDC on Arc grew by more than half in the month. It rose for one reason: Circle created new USDC directly for a few large accounts. Ordinary bridge traffic went the other way, and more money left Arc through Circle's CCTP bridge than arrived.

Money in and money outUSDC created (minted) and destroyed (burned) on Arc per week

The dollars on Arc sit in very few places. In mid-October, two dozen addresses held nine in ten of all the USDC on the chain. Of the addresses holding any USDC at all, only about one in ten held a dollar or more.

Two dozen addresses hold 92% of the dollarswho holds Arc's $604M of USDC, mid-October

We could not tie a name to any of these three accounts. What the record does show is a path. Circle creates dollars on Arc for a few large accounts, and much of that money moves on to exchanges. For at least one large account, Arc already works as a route from Circle's minting to Binance deposits. For the public it is still a small chain.

07 · LendingThe one market that filled up

At launch, Morpho on Arc held well over a hundred million dollars of USDC that nobody had borrowed. A month later its main market, which lends USDC against cirBTC, is 97% lent out, and borrowing has gone from nothing to $190M.

The borrowers are few and large, and the six biggest owe about three quarters of the debt. Five of those six bridged every dollar they borrowed off Arc through CCTP, each to its own address on the other side, mostly on Ethereum. Arc is where they post bitcoin and pick up dollars. They spend the dollars somewhere else.

A loan like this has a limit. If bitcoin falls far enough that the debt passes 86% of the collateral's value, Morpho lets anyone repay the loan and take the bitcoin at a discount. That forced sale is a liquidation, and the price at which it starts is the borrower's liquidation line.

How far bitcoin would have to fallMorpho USDC / cirBTC market on Arc, 14 Oct 2026

The chart shows two cliffs. The first comes if bitcoin loses about a fifth of its value, when a third of the debt reaches its limit. The second comes if it loses about a third, when nine in ten does. On a chain this concentrated, a sharp fall in bitcoin would be the first real test of its biggest market.

08 · A comparisonRobinhood Chain went the other way

Robinhood Chain opened to the public in early July, eleven weeks before Arc. We counted both chains the same way, by day since launch, without removing farms or bots from either.

Two launches, opposite shapeswallets per day that sent a successful transaction, by day since public launch

Robinhood Chain started smaller and grew 5.3-fold from its first full day. Arc started with a bang and kept 6% of it. By the fourth week Robinhood Chain had ten times Arc's senders and twelve times its traders. Robinhood's counts carry their own farms and bots, so the gap in real people is smaller than those ratios. Even so, one chain grew and the other shrank.

09 · What it adds up toA dollar rail first, a public chain second

After one month, Arc does one thing at scale. Circle creates dollars there for a few large accounts, those dollars move to exchanges, and borrowers post Circle's bitcoin to carry dollars to other chains. Those flows run to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The public side is small and shrinking. Real traders number about 11,000 per day. Launchpads have stopped producing tokens anyone wants. Much of the volume a dashboard shows comes from one wallet and one bot fleet. The question for Arc's second month is whether anything brings ordinary users back, or whether the chain settles into the role its first month already shows, as a back office for USDC.

FAQ

What is the Arc blockchain?

Arc is a blockchain built by Circle, the company that issues the USDC digital dollar. It opened to the public on 16 September 2026. Network fees on Arc are paid in USDC instead of a separate coin, and Circle also issues its euro coin EURC and a tokenized bitcoin, cirBTC, on it.

How many people use Arc?

Nobody can count people, only wallets. On launch day 406,006 wallets sent a successful transaction. In the fourth week the average was 24,678 per day. With wallet farms, heavy bots and the largest trader removed, about 20,000 real senders and 11,000 real traders were active per day.

How much USDC is on Arc?

About $599M at the end of the first month, up from $376M at launch. 24 addresses held 92% of it in mid-October, and one wallet alone held $250M.

What is cirBTC?

cirBTC is Circle's tokenized bitcoin on Arc. About 5,238 cirBTC existed after the first month, and roughly 70% of it was posted as collateral on Morpho to borrow USDC.

Is Arc trading volume real?

Partly. Arc's DEX volume averaged $64M per day in the fourth week, but real traders made about $3.6M per day of it. Over the month one self-trading wallet made 38% of all volume and a fleet of 117 bots made 22%.

What is the Argus launchpad on Arc?

Argus is the token launchpad behind about nine in ten of the tokens launched on Arc in its first month, 179,567 in all. Launches fell from more than 22,000 per day in launch week to about 100 per day by mid-October.