Circle releases ARC white paper: initial supply of 10 billion tokens, 60% allocated to the ecosystem, mainnet expected to launch this summer.

According to Mars Finance, on May 11th, Circle officially released the ARC white paper, outlining the design framework for ARC as the native coordination asset of the Arc blockchain network. Arc is a public Layer 1 blockchain, positioned as an "Economic OS of the Internet," providing shared, composable infrastructure to support economic contracts, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and global market operations. ARC is the utility-based native asset of the Arc network, enabling participants to successfully align with the network in the long term through staking, governance, fee capture, and platform-level utility functions. ARC does not represent any equity, debt, revenue rights, or asset claims of Circle; its economic value derives entirely from the interaction between participants and the Arc network. ARC undertakes five major structural functions: economic alignment (staking and security), platform utility functions (discounts and priority access), fee capture and distribution, governance, and utility functions that grow with platform expansion. Supply and Inflation: The initial supply of ARC is 10 billion tokens. Initially, a decaying inflation model will be used (expected initial annualized return of approximately 2-3%) to reward validators and stakers. The long-term goal is to completely offset new issuance through the burning of tokens generated by network activity, achieving "inflation neutrality." • Fee Conversion: Regardless of the asset used by users to pay protocol fees (e.g., USDC), all fees will be converted to ARC at the protocol layer and then divided into two parts: one part will be allocated to validators and stakers as compensation, and the other part will be permanently burned to offset inflation. • Allocation Scheme: 60% will be allocated to the ecosystem (token sales, developer funding, network growth); 25% will be allocated to Circle (protocol development, staking, and governance); and 15% will be allocated to long-term reserves (strategic flexibility and economic stability). Regarding governance, after Arc upgrades to a PoS mechanism, economic parameters (fee rates, inflation, and burning logic) will be determined by ARC stakers through governance voting. Initially, Circle will be responsible for protocol upgrades, security incident response, and validator member management, gradually transitioning to token holder governance as the network matures. The Arc public testnet launched in October 2025 and had processed 244.1 million transactions as of May 5, 2026. The mainnet is expected to launch in the summer of 2026.