Arc Chain, in Numbers: One Dollar, Two Decimals, and 97,000 Tokens in a Day
Originally published on xroot.dev . Circle opened Arc's public mainnet on 16 September 2026. Four days later I read it the way I read every new chain — from its own node, with eth_call , ignoring the launch posts. Six numbers came back that the launch posts do not carry, and two of them will bite anyone who integrates the chain from a table instead of a query. The headline facts hold up: an EVM…
On 16 September 2026, Circle launched Arc's public mainnet. Four days later, a reporter queried the chain directly, finding several key figures that were not mentioned in launch posts. The chain operates on an EVM layer 1 with a USDC native coin, blocks every half second, and has a deterministic finality. The validator set consists of twelve named institutions including Circle, BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, ICE, and six others, all running proof of authority.
The reporter retrieved four important figures from the chain: the chain ID, the Reth-based client used, the block size, and the gas cost per transaction. The chain ID is 5042 (0x13b2), the client is an Reth-based one under Malachite BFT consensus, the block size is 30 million gas, and the average gas used per transaction is between 3-11%.
The reporter then noted the native coin's peculiarities: USDC is counted in 18 decimals by the node but in 6 by its ERC-20 contract, making the balance a trillion times apart. Despite this discrepancy, the native coin and ERC-20 balance are the same. Furthermore, the contract at 0x3600...0000 emits Transfer events for native movements, which could be considered EIP-7708 in practice.
However, Arc's own wallet guide advises dividing by a trillion to display the balance, and the network parameters page warns about potential display issues with wallets that do not support custom gas tokens.
Lastly, the reporter examined Arc's fee model, which is an EIP-1559 with a moving average on top and a hard floor of 20 gwei. The base fee remains constant under normal load, never moving. This fee model eliminates the need for oracles, as the price is pinned and denominated in dollars. The reporter estimated that the whole daily gas take for Arc would be around a thousand dollars, with a fee quote for a plain transfer costing $0.00046 and an ERC-20 transfer costing $0.0014.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
