Arc blockchain by Circle: four days after launch, half of its DEX volume was fake, and two wallets made it
The Arc blockchain by Circle went live on September 16. Four days later its DEX volume looked healthy: up on the day before, close to where it stood on day three. We pulled every swap through Bitquery and split the total by token. Two tokens minted the night before, one named Wrapped Ether and one named Argus, made up almost half of it. Nearly all of that came from two transactions, one from each of two wallets. The same two wallets had signed three more the night before. Each transaction bought and sold the same token up to twenty times and ended close to where it started. Take all five out and Arc's trading fell by a quarter that day.
01 — The headline numberDay five looked like a recovery
Arc is the blockchain built by Circle, the company behind USDC. USDC pays the gas, and the pitch is payments and foreign exchange. It opened to the public on September 16. Like every new chain, it opened to a rush of airdrop hunters, NFT mints and memecoins, and then the rush thinned out.
By the fifth day most measures were sliding. Transactions were down. Active wallets were down. One number was holding up: DEX volume, the dollar value of swaps on the chain's exchanges, measured here on the USDC side of each trade.
| Day (UTC) | Transactions | Active wallets | DEX volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 18 | 2.47M | 121K | $82.9M |
| Sep 19 | 1.48M | 100K | $75.4M |
| Sep 20 | 1.27M | 63K | $81.5M |
Wallets fell by more than a third in a day while trading went up. Those two facts do not sit well together, so we split the volume by token.
02 — The splitTwo tokens, minted the night before
The top of the list for September 20 was not cirBTC, or the Argus launchpad token, or any memecoin with a crowd behind it. It was two contracts that did not exist a day earlier.
| Token on Sep 20 | Contract | Minted (UTC) | USDC volume | Wallets trading it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ARGUS | 0x972b159ca91baec0ec88f2c114cf1d7aa5db240e | Sep 19, 23:50 | $19.94M | 7 |
| WETH | 0x93ffd195481e8c08eb25a158689e4d9e61313111 | Sep 19, 23:04 | $19.94M | 5 |
| cirBTC | 0x171a4217b86a807a64eb94757db6849fb4bdbaa0 | launch week | $5.31M | 2,600 |
| ARGUS, the launchpad's token | 0xece5ca8bf9220718e5727754026757512212cb3c | launch week | $2.27M | 3,109 |
| WETH, the bridged token | 0x128cc466b61f542da60c70e3aa11c10e19b84edb | launch week | $1.56M | 280 |
Both new tokens share a name and a ticker with a token people on Arc already trade. We will call them the Argus-named token and the WETH-named token. We found nothing on-chain that ties either one to the Argus launchpad or to any bridge, and we are not saying anyone at those projects made them.
Both also trade at a price that looks right. The WETH-named token changed hands at about the same dollar price as bridged WETH. The Argus-named token sat at about 1.8 cents, where the launchpad's ARGUS was trading. A screener that sorts by volume and shows a ticker would put both at the top of Arc, with a believable price next to each.
Over the two days they existed, the pair added up to a large slice of the whole chain.
| Day (UTC) | All DEX volume | The two tokens | Their share | Volume without them |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 19 | $75.4M | $19.9M | 26.5% | $55.4M |
| Sep 20 | $81.5M | $39.9M | 48.9% | $41.6M |
The last column is the one that matters. Without the pair, trading on Arc fell by a quarter between the two days, in step with everything else on the chain.
03 — The five transactionsTwenty buys, twenty sells, one signature
Almost all of that volume sits in five txs. One wallet signed the three in the WETH-named token. A second wallet signed the two in the Argus-named token.
| # | Time (UTC) | Token | Signed by | Buys | Sells | Total swaps | Volume counted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sep 19, 23:06 | WETH-named | Wallet A | 10 | 10 | 20 | $1.99M |
| 2 | Sep 19, 23:13 | WETH-named | Wallet A | 20 | 20 | 40 | $7.98M |
| 3 | Sep 19, 23:53 | Argus-named | Wallet B | 10 | 10 | 20 | $9.97M |
| 4 | Sep 20, 19:29 | WETH-named | Wallet A | 20 | 20 | 40 | $19.94M |
| 5 | Sep 20, 19:32 | Argus-named | Wallet B | 20 | 20 | 40 | $19.94M |
| All five | 80 | 80 | 160 | $59.82M |
Wallet A is 0x3f5d6d4a48540fed25d1aa9b63fe55adb25d7dbe. Wallet B is 0x32277a261397cdbfc890d995040910f9b4d7a299. A buy and a sell each count as one swap, so a transaction with ten of each holds twenty. Volume counted is the USDC side of every swap added together, which is how a volume table reads it.
| # | Transaction hash |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0x39cdeaddedcbf3951fbc91f1ca372b0a6eb763e30e0ac2cea1c1362b4a903ac9 |
| 2 | 0x80e484e39286cdfbeed79ec2146c7f9c168005fde7f15af74fcc73cc0b015893 |
| 3 | 0xf940ae982dbbc422c169cecb9c67c2902a8437809773fae66c6a85e9b36481c4 |
| 4 | 0x1d5be833a1fe942ab04e39fc9fcabd7638cb8ce4d38999297c159be88dbfb4eb |
| 5 | 0xe1f83c0f67a4fd00a1217793121047b029f175b34f9eedd32997ca4b7223bdd8 |
Every one of the five has the same number of buys as sells. In the three largest, each swap is worth roughly half a million dollars. The last two landed less than three minutes apart and match each other almost to the dollar.
Everything else these two wallets did in the two tokens, seventeen more txs, comes to a few hundred dollars. Every other wallet that ever touched either token, fourteen of them, adds up to about seven hundred dollars. The five txs are the market.
04 — The money$59.8 million of trades from a $5,200 balance
Swapping half a million dollars forty times over should take a lot of money. These wallets do not have it.
| Wallet | What the chain shows |
|---|---|
| 0x3f5d6d4a48540fed25d1aa9b63fe55adb25d7dbesigned the three WETH-named transactions | Holds about $5,177 of USDC. Paid $1.07 in gas across 299 transactions since Sep 17. Minted the WETH-named token itself, 100,000 units, two minutes before trading it. Also holds 100,000 units each of three more contracts named WETH. |
| 0x32277a261397cdbfc890d995040910f9b4d7a299signed the two Argus-named transactions | Holds about $16 of USDC. Paid $0.19 in gas across 21 transactions. Its first transaction came ten seconds after it was sent 1.5 USDC by the address that minted the Argus-named token. |
How does a wallet with five thousand dollars print twenty million in one tx? Both tokens trade on Uniswap v4, and v4 keeps a running tab. Inside one tx a trader can buy and sell as often as they like, and the pool only asks them to settle the net difference at the end. Buy half a million of a token, sell it straight back, and the amount owed at the end is close to zero. Do that twenty times and an indexer records forty swaps of half a million each.
That is our reading of the mechanism, and it fits what the chain shows: equal buys and sells, one signature, tiny balances, and a dollar of gas. We did not decode the custom contracts the wallets called, so treat the mechanism as an inference. The totals are measured.
One detail is worth stating plainly. Bitquery's own index counted these swaps too. They are real swaps in the sense that the pool executed them. Any tool that adds up swap amounts, ours included, will report them as volume unless someone looks at who was trading.
05 — The airdropA thousand wallets got up to $26,000 on paper
The Argus-named token came with a second step. In the three minutes after minting it, the same address sent it to 1,002 wallets. The amounts varied, and the largest were about 1.4 million tokens. At the pool's price that is roughly $26,000 sitting in a wallet, in a token with the same name as one the holder may already own.
| Step (Sep 19, UTC) | What happened |
|---|---|
| 23:50:04 | 0x8ed0712beb6e9f53da8d6e750b65f4b0367f9dae mints one billion of the Argus-named token |
| 23:51:52 to 23:54:58 | The same address sends it to 1,002 wallets, up to about 1.4M tokens each |
| 23:52:36 | The same address sends 1.5 USDC to the wallet that will trade it |
| 23:53:46 | That wallet signs the first $9.97M transaction |
A handful of other wallets did sell the token, and they got real USDC, a few dollars to a few hundred each. We did not test what happens when someone tries to sell the full amount, and we are not claiming the token is a trap. What the record shows is narrower: a token was handed to a thousand wallets, given a familiar name and a believable price, and pushed to the top of the chain's volume table inside the same four minutes.
We have covered the same playbook on other chains, in the $LAPTOP counterfeit market, the counterfeit SOL wash machine and our test of whether wash trading ever draws a real crowd. Arc is five days old and already has its own.
06 — Is Arc a payments chain instead?We checked the transfers too
A fair objection: Arc was built for payments, so judging it by DEX volume may miss the point. Tron is the model here, a chain where most of the activity is people sending stablecoins to each other. So we counted those on Arc for September 20.
| Measure, Sep 20 (UTC) | Value |
|---|---|
| Direct USDC token transfersa wallet calling the USDC contract to pay another address | 17,916 from 2,166 senders · $10.3M |
| …of which under one dollar | 11,321, or 63% |
| …of which $10,000 or more | 27 transfers carrying $9.3M, or 90% of the value |
| Plain native USDC sendsvalue transfers with a basic gas limit, used here as a proxy for wallet-to-wallet payments | 63,589 from 25,131 senders · $26.1M |
| All USDC transfer events, for comparison | 751,523 · $130.5M |
| Direct EURC token transfers | 32 from 13 senders · €5.8M |
Most USDC that moved on Arc that day moved inside swaps, mints and contract calls. Plain payments were a small slice, and two thirds of the direct token transfers were under a dollar. The busiest receiving addresses each took a few hundred transfers worth a fraction of a cent, from the same three dozen senders, which is what dust and farming look like.
That does not settle what Arc becomes. Five days is early, the large transfers are real money, and a payments chain is built by firms that move slowly. It does mean the payments story is not yet visible on-chain, and the trading story needs the two tokens above taken out before anyone reads it.
07 — What to checkBefore you trust a volume table on a new chain
Every query ran through the Bitquery Arc API
Daily DEX volume summed on the USDC side of each swap, split by token contract and by signing wallet. Per-transaction buy and sell counts for the two wallets. Mint and transfer records for both tokens, holder rankings, wallet balances and gas paid. Direct USDC and EURC transfers bucketed by size.
08 — SourcesOff-chain sources
Every figure about swaps, transfers, balances and mints here is on-chain data from the Bitquery Arc API, using the DEX trades API for swaps and the Arc mainnet docs for the network's USDC model. Three claims rest on something other than the chain.
| Claim | Source |
|---|---|
| Arc's launch date and purposepublic mainnet on Sep 16, USDC as gas, payments and FX | Arc's own launch post, linked in section 01, read Sep 21 2026. |
| Uniswap v4 settles net balances per transactionthe basis for our reading of section 04 | Uniswap's v4 documentation on flash accounting, linked in section 04, read Sep 21 2026. How these particular transactions used it is our inference. |
| Which ARGUS and WETH are the established ones0xece5…cb3c and 0x128c…4edb | Judged by trading history and holder counts on-chain: thousands of traders since launch week against a handful. We have not confirmed either address with its issuer. |
09 — Still openThreads we did not pull
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This article is provided for informational and educational purposes only and reflects analysis of publicly available on-chain data as of the dates indicated. It does not constitute legal, financial, compliance, tax, or investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation, solicitation, or offer to buy, sell, or hold any token or asset, or to use or avoid any blockchain, exchange, or protocol.
What was measured: swap, transfer, mint, balance and gas records on the Arc blockchain, read through Bitquery's index over a rolling window that did not cover Arc's first day. Volume figures are sums of the USDC side of each recorded swap and depend on that method; another method will give other totals. What was inferred: that buys and sells inside a single transaction offset one another, that Uniswap v4's net settlement is how small balances produced large recorded volume, that the recorded volume did not reflect independent buyers and sellers, and that the addresses described may be related. We did not decode the contracts involved. These inferences may be incomplete or wrong.
Blockchain addresses are pseudonymous. No address in this article is attributed to any person, company, or project, and none should be read as so attributed. Funding relationships, shared timing and matching amounts are described as observed; they do not establish common ownership, identity, intent, or knowledge. The terms wash trading, round trip, look-alike and fake volume are used descriptively, to characterise a pattern in trade data. They are not findings that any person committed market manipulation, fraud, or any other offence under the law of any jurisdiction, and should not be read as accusations of criminal, civil, or regulatory wrongdoing.
The two tokens examined share a name and ticker with other tokens. Nothing here asserts that either was created by, connected to, authorised by, or endorsed by Argus, Uniswap Labs, the Uniswap Foundation, Circle, Arc, the issuer of any wrapped or bridged ether, or any other named person or organisation, and nothing here asserts that any of those parties knew of, took part in, or benefited from the activity described. We did not test whether holders of either token can sell it at scale and make no claim either way. Statements about which similarly named token is the established one rest on on-chain trading history only and have not been confirmed with any issuer.
Nothing here is a statement that Arc is unsafe, failing, or unsuitable for any purpose. The activity described is permissionless third-party activity of a kind seen on every public chain. Arc had been live for five days at the time of writing, all figures cover short and partly incomplete periods, and early activity on a new network is not a reliable guide to its future. References to screeners, trackers and volume tables are general; we did not review what any specific data provider displayed, and nothing here asserts that any provider's figures are inaccurate under its own stated method. Bitquery's own index recorded the swaps described. Bitquery sells blockchain data products, including APIs for Arc data, and has a commercial interest in on-chain analytics.
Newly launched tokens, tokens received unsolicited, and tokens that share a name with a better known asset are extremely high risk, and most participants in such tokens lose money. Do not interact with a token solely because it appears in your wallet.
Nothing herein should be relied upon as a definitive determination of fact. Readers should conduct their own independent verification before taking any action. The authors and publisher accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this material. All trademarks and company names are the property of their respective owners. If you believe any statement here is inaccurate, contact Bitquery and we will review it.