How it works

Arc is a Layer 1 where USDC is the gas token, so every price on this site is already a dollar price. There is no separate gas asset to hold and no conversion happening quietly behind a number you are reading.

Two different kinds of data feed these pages, and it is worth knowing which is which. Anything about the launchpad, and the list of newly created pools, is read straight from the chain by this site, so it cannot show you something the chain does not say. Longer market history for existing tokens, meaning charts, holders and past trades, comes from a third-party indexer, which is faster but is one step removed from the chain.

Prices come from the pools themselves, quoted in USDC. A token traded across several venues is priced from the pool that actually carries its liquidity, not from an average that no trade could ever get. Sorting by volume, market cap, holders or change moves the whole list rather than reordering one page of it.

Each row links to the token page, which carries a chart, the pools it trades in, its holders and its recent trades. The buy buttons on a row skip that page entirely: they quote every venue, take the best net price, and open your wallet with the transaction already built.

A buy is simulated against the chain before your wallet opens. If it would revert, you are told instead of being asked to sign something that was always going to fail.

This page reads pool creation events directly from the Uniswap v3 factory, the v4 pool manager and the v2 forks on Arc. A pool shows up here seconds after it exists, which is usually well before it has any trades at all.

That is the whole point of the page, and also its risk. A pool with no history is a pool nobody has tested. The one filter worth leaving on is USDC pairs only: anything else has no route through our router and cannot be bought from here.

Arc has Uniswap v4, Uniswap v3 and two v2 forks. A swap here quotes all of them, including routes that hop through USDC, and ranks them by what you actually receive rather than by headline price. A venue with a better raw quote but a worse fee loses.

1. 1

   Quote

   Every candidate route is priced on chain at the size you entered. Nothing is estimated off a stale reserve.

2. 2

   Simulate

   The winning route is executed against the current state first. If it reverts, you find out before signing.

3. 3

   Sign

   Your wallet sends it. The transaction carries a minimum output, so a price that moves against you between signing and landing fails rather than fills badly.

Slippage is the gap you are willing to accept between the quote and the fill. New and thin pools move more between blocks, so a tight tolerance there means a lot of failed transactions. The quick buy buttons use a looser tolerance than the swap page for exactly that reason, and say so.

Bridging is closed while Arc's mainnet routes come up. The rest of this section describes how it works once it opens.

Bridging uses CCTP, which burns USDC on the chain you are leaving and mints the same amount on Arc. There is no pool in the middle, no wrapped asset and no liquidity that can run out. You can bring USDC from Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet, Polygon PoS, Avalanche, Unichain, Linea.

You can also start from a token that is not USDC. In that case the token is sold for USDC on the source chain through Uniswap first, in your own wallet, and only the USDC crosses. Nothing of ours holds your funds at any point in that sequence.

Mechanism

Circle CCTP, burn and mint

What arrives

Native USDC on Arc

Bridge fee

None

Rate

1:1

A transfer needs an attestation from Circle before it can be claimed on Arc, which takes a short while. Leaving the page does not lose the transfer; it stays claimable.

There is no presale and no allocation held back for anyone, including the creator. The entire supply is minted onto the curve when the launch is created, so at the moment trading opens nobody is holding a position that everyone else has to buy from.

The curve

A bonding curve is a vending machine. It will always sell you tokens and always buy them back, at a price worked out from how much of the supply has been bought so far. The price rises as people buy and falls as they sell. You are never waiting for someone else to take the other side of your trade.

The price does not start at zero. Each launch opens at a set price, which is why the first buyer does not get the supply for nothing. Large buys move the price more than small ones, so the price you end up paying on a big order is worse than the one you were quoted. That is true of any market with limited depth.

Graduation

Once the curve has collected $10.5K it closes, and the launch graduates into a Uniswap pool in that same transaction. The pool is seeded with everything the curve collected plus the 28.57% of supply that was held back from the start for exactly this. Because that share is fixed when the launch is created, every launch graduates into a pool of the same size at the same price, whether it was bought out by one order or by hundreds.

The position is then held by a contract that has no withdrawal function in it. Not for the creator, not for us, not for anyone. This is worth being precise about: it is not a promise that the liquidity will not be removed, it is that no code exists which could remove it.

If your buy is larger than what is left on the curve, you are not rejected. You buy what remains, you are charged only for that, and the rest is returned in the same transaction.

Launch protection

A launch is most vulnerable in its first seconds, when a bot watching for new curves can buy the opening before anyone has seen the token exists. Every launch therefore opens with a tax on buys that starts near total and decays to nothing within seconds. It applies only to buying, never to selling, and the creator and their fee recipient are exempt so they cannot snipe their own launch. What it collects is not burned; it joins the launch fee and is distributed the same way.

In practice this means waiting a few seconds after a launch opens costs you nothing and saves you a great deal. The trade panel shows the tax while it is still decaying.

Creating one

1. 1

   Describe the token

   Name, symbol, image and links. The image is uploaded and its address is written into the token itself, so it resolves for anyone looking at it later.

2. 2

   Choose your fee, if any

   You can charge a trade fee of your own on top of the protocol's. It is capped, and fixed the moment the launch opens, so it can never be raised on holders afterwards.

3. 3

   Launch

   You pay $1.25 and the supply is minted onto the curve. You receive no tokens. You cannot mint more, change the price, or reach the liquidity after it graduates.

Supply

1,000,000,000

Opens at

$4.2K of virtual depth

Graduates at

$10.5K collected

Into the pool

28.57% of supply

Trade fee

1%, plus any creator fee

Launch fee

$1.25

Paste an address or connect a wallet. Positions are priced with the same pool quotes the screener uses, and profit and loss is measured against what was actually paid for each position rather than against a first-seen price.

Nothing is stored. Reading a portfolio requires no signature, and an address you look at is not recorded anywhere on our side.

Swap

0% of what you receive

Bridge

Not open yet

Launchpad trade

1%, shared with the creator

Launchpad creation

$1.25

Screener, portfolio, new pairs

Free

The swap fee is taken inside the same transaction as the swap itself. On Uniswap v3 and v4 that uses mechanisms the routers already have. The two v2 forks on Arc have nothing of the kind, so those fills run through our own contract, which measures the output it actually received, takes the fee from that, and holds the router to the minimum you agreed on the amount left. It never trusts what the router claims to have sent.

Routes are ranked by what reaches you after all of this, so a venue we earn nothing extra from still wins if it pays you more.

Pools charge their own fee on top, which goes to liquidity providers rather than to us, and is already reflected in the quote you are shown.

The launchpad is a fork of an existing MIT-licensed launch protocol, taken from its verified deployment rather than from a repository, so what runs here is what runs in production elsewhere. The locker is the one worth checking first: it is the contract that holds every graduated position, and it has no function that takes liquidity out.

One thing to be straight about: the explorer cannot show you this source yet. Arcscan verifies through Sourcify, which does not support Arc, so every contract on this chain reads as bytecode only, ours included. Until that changes the source lives in our public repository, where you can compile it yourself and compare the bytecode against what is deployed.

Swap aggregator

0xf560D0Ec8a6Ce70345D4f58bdb5495AF31C0C993

Launch factory

0x6C5F6c3c03b263B09d2bf050fbECE85DFf8DC270

Liquidity locker

0xAC4e0F473515f385DB0DC0b701C2D67262a56bEF

Launch fee hook

0x4971c67dD841c684404C7bFCC1D36E874F286044

Fee escrow

0x46c695d1Eba2411824C22DF59b8F488493a72aa5

Anyone can create a token with any name, symbol and image, including ones that deliberately imitate something else. Names are not unique and are not verified by us. The token address is the only identifier that cannot be copied, so check it.

Reaching graduation is not a signal of quality. It only means the curve sold out. A locked pool guarantees that the liquidity stays there; it guarantees nothing about the price.

A creator can set a trade fee of their own within the protocol cap. It is shown on every launch page before you trade.

Tokens can lose all their value. Transactions are submitted by your own wallet and are irreversible. Nothing on this site is financial advice, and we do not take custody of your assets at any point.