Can Circle's Arc really generate a big meme market like Robinhood Chain?

Circle's self-built public chain Arc has finally launched, generating significant buzz. On the eve of the launch, dozens of launch platforms were poised to take off, and after the launch, meme tokens like LONG and TOLLY quickly stirred up some market activity. About 2 hours after the Arc mainnet went live, the total on-chain USDC reached 372 million, accounting for approximately 0.5% of the total USDC supply.

Arc's official account posted a preview on X platform, announcing that a more powerful Economic OS is about to launch. Additionally, Arc will hold a live stream for the mainnet launch in New York.

Under the meme hype model from the first two months of Robinhood Chain, Arc is also expected to perform well, but with all roles and funds in place, can the wealth effect truly sustain itself under Circle's compliance gene after short-term speculation?

Crypto hasn't seen this much FOMO in a long time

As market attention focuses on the AI boom and traditional stock market trends, Crypto hasn't been this lively or even FOMO-driven in a long time.

The last time there was a lively atmosphere was after Robinhood launched its own public chain, Robinhood Chain, but what sets Arc apart this time is that, following the model established by Robinhood Chain, many have started to jump the gun.

The most direct manifestation is that there are even more launch platforms than new coins. Launch platforms like Tolly, Warp, and ArcPad have already laid out their strategies on the testnet, with wallets, DEXs, and cross-chain tools gradually coming online. Even before the mainnet opened, dozens of launchpads were already operational. The meme tokens on the Arc chain had already been speculated upon before the mainnet launch, with various participation tutorials flying around.

The scarcity of chips has directly driven up the premium on USDC, with the Arc chain USDC exchange premium reaching as high as 1.8 times, meaning retail investors are willing to pay an additional 80% just to hold chips at the moment the mainnet opens.

Exchanges and infrastructure providers are also very proactive. Wallets and trading infrastructures like Binance Wallet, OKX, Bitget, Gate, MetaMask, and Upbit announced their support early on. The official disclosure of the first-day ecosystem also includes DeFi protocols like Aave, Uniswap, Aerodrome, Morpho, and stablecoin payment service providers like Rain, Thunes, and Wirex; institutions like BlackRock, DTCC, and Standard Chartered are advancing collaborations in tokenized assets, foreign exchange, custody, and settlement.

The hype around Arc even momentarily overshadowed the "Clear Act"—a legislative vote concerning the entire crypto market structure. The timing of Arc's mainnet launch coinciding with the vote on the "Clear Act" raises questions about whether this was intentional or merely a coincidence.

After short-term speculation, can Arc truly replicate the wealth effect of Robinhood Chain?

However, with expectations running high and all roles and funds prepared in advance, can Arc sustain the wealth effect seen with Robinhood Chain?

Robinhood Chain did create a lot of buzz in its first two months, with on-chain transactions continuously breaking records. Many players, having missed out on Robinhood Chain, are pinning their hopes on Arc, leading to Circle co-founder Jeremy Allaire responding to the first-day support for platforms like FOMO, which the market interpreted as a sign of openness to meme activities.

But currently, regarding whether Arc will continue to see significant meme activity, many voices from Twitter and the community are not optimistic.

On the surface, both Arc and Robinhood Chain are traditional financial giants entering the blockchain space, with narratives centered around the integration of TradFi and DeFi and providing on-chain financial infrastructure.

However, there are many differences this time. Beyond the narrative being overdrawn, a more critical factor is that the genes of Arc and Robinhood Chain are actually different.

Robinhood Chain is backed by exchanges and a large retail user base, with most of its on-chain heat driven by meme activity. Crypto researcher Haotian @tmel0211 mentioned that this is inseparable from Robinhood's brokerage gene and its openness to memes and tokenization, which are unknowns for Circle.

The difference between ARC and Robinhood Chain lies in its institutional and compliance genes. Many community players believe that compared to Tether's public chains like Plasma and Stable, which aim to create payment and settlement scenarios, the genes and objectives of these stablecoin and payment-focused institutions are entirely different from those of brokerages that favor traffic and trading heat. Historically, such public chains have not seen large-scale meme activities.

Additionally, while Robinhood Chain appears lively, in the meme market, only a few memes can truly succeed, and how many actually profit from meme speculation? While most remember the wealth stories of PONS, they forget that many paid tuition through the repeated failures of early leaders.

Has the era of everyone entering the public chain ended?

Compared to the potential short-term market and wealth effects that may arise at the beginning of Arc's launch, what is more worth discussing is the structural changes happening behind the scenes.

Traditional finance and stablecoin giants are entering the space, with Robinhood launching its own chain, Circle building Arc, and Tether advancing its own or related settlement networks. Arc is particularly typical. Its list of founding validators is almost a who's who of core Wall Street institutions. BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation), ICE (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange), Galaxy, and Standard Chartered are among them. These institutions are not only potential users but also directly participate in the network's security and consensus.

For the entire Crypto industry, this signifies a shift in value capture logic from "issuing tokens and telling narratives" to "real business implementation." When it comes to the public chain track itself, the impact is even more direct. In the past few cycles, public chains were the hottest gold rush track, with almost everyone working on Layer 1/Layer 2 when application scenarios were unclear, leading to an oversaturation of public chains. Now, the circulation of stablecoins, institutional settlements, and compliance entry have become core competitive advantages, making it increasingly difficult for pure technical advantages to independently support a chain.

Since the beginning of this year, a number of projects like Scroll, Harmony, Moonbeam, Saga, Lisk, Secret Network, Sophon, as well as Loopring, Dango, DFK Chain, and others have successively shut down or transformed, from established ZK projects to modular public chains, collectively exiting the foundational arena. The survival space for general public chains has been rapidly compressed. What remains are those "realist public chains" that come with scenarios and users. The era of everyone entering the public chain may have already ended.