Circle, the issuer of USDC, the world's second-largest dollar stablecoin, launched a new public chain called Arc on September 16. On the list of founding validators, besides Circle itself, are BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
On its first day, Arc processed 7.76 million transactions. Of that, 82% of DEX trading volume came from meme coin launchpads, with Arguspad alone taking in $202 million and minting more than 80,000 new coins within 24 hours.
On July 1 this year, Robinhood launched Robinhood Chain, built on the Arbitrum tech stack and focused on tokenized stock trading — users can trade exposure to these tokens on-chain just like buying and selling stocks, and can also use them for lending or as collateral. Co-founder Johann Kerbrat later explained that Robinhood Chain uses a "barbell strategy": meme coins and real-world asset tokenization run in parallel, not a case of doing serious business first and then being taken over by meme coins — it was designed that way from the start.
74 million. 8 million — roughly 28 times Robinhood Chain's first day. Looking at infrastructure alone, both chains already had mature protocols like Uniswap and Morpho integrated at launch. The gap shows more clearly in what kind of money flowed in first: most of Robinhood Chain's early capital settled into Morpho's lending pools to earn yield, with 90% of its first-week $100 million in locked value coming from there; on Arc's first day, launchpads took the lion's share. The same infrastructure caught two completely different kinds of money.
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