Arc, the public blockchain built by Circle, is scheduled to open its public mainnet on Sept. 16. In the final 48 hours before launch, attention around the network has moved beyond the institutional story and toward a more speculative contest: who controls token issuance on Arc, and which launchpads will capture the fees.
The institutional pitch is still there. Arc uses USDC as both the gas token and unit of account, and it is marketed around sub-second deterministic finality. Its founding validator list includes BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, Standard Chartered, and DTCC. In Arc’s earlier presale, institutions backed the chain at a fully diluted valuation of $3 billion.
But according to TechFlow’s Sept. 14 review, the immediate heat in the market is coming from retail positioning inside the future Arc ecosystem rather than from the validator roster. The report said demand to position early around Circle’s Arc ecosystem kept rising on Sept. 14, with the premium on related USDC swaps reaching as high as 1.8x.
Most of the current trading data comes from Arc’s private mainnet environment
One key point frames the entire launchpad discussion: Arc’s public mainnet is not open yet. The trading volumes and market cap figures circulating in communities are being generated inside what the article described as Arc’s "private mainnet" early deployment environment, which has already been opened to more than 100 institutions and ecosystem teams.
Those figures are not from a toy sandbox. The platform tokens discussed in the report are already deployed on Arc’s private mainnet under Chain ID 5042. Contracts, pools, and trades are real, but public access is still restricted. The Sept. 16 public mainnet event is described as the opening of the gate to that same chain, which is why traders are willing to position ahead of time: the tokens and liquidity pools should continue to exist after public access begins.
Still, the report drew a clear line. Early private-market snapshots can show that a launchpad’s plumbing works, but they do not prove that the platform has real speculative density or durable market demand once the broader public arrives.
Model one: direct liquidity locks instead of bonding curves
The first group skips the familiar Pump.fun style path in which trading begins on an internal bonding curve and only later "graduates" to a DEX. In this design, the creator launches a token and the full supply goes straight into a permanently locked USDC liquidity pool, making the asset tradable from the first block.
Tolly
Tolly (@tollylabs) was presented as one of the strongest platforms in terms of actual early trading inside the pre-deployment environment. Its buy-side fee is about 1%, split with notable precision: roughly 64% goes to the creator, 12% to a holder reward pool, 10% to the protocol, and the rest to buybacks and burns.
The early data snapshot cited in the article shows about $1.8 million in cumulative trading volume. Its platform token, TOLLY, briefly reached a market cap of about $2.47 million.
TOLLY contract: 0xbc43ce8dec648ea298c4275559b81d6261c90b67.
ArcPad
ArcPad (@arcpad_meme) takes a cleaner route structurally. There is no internal market. The full token supply is turned into a one-sided Uniswap V3 position and locked into a fee locker, with a 2% anti-sniping cap per address.
That cleaner design has come with a cost in early testing. The report said ArcPad has only around 15 tokens and less than $30,000 in total trading volume in the early environment. Its launch list shows about 20 tokens, mostly around $3,000 in market cap, with individual trades often in the teens or around $20. In practical terms, the platform remains lightly used.
Model two: bonding-curve launchpads following the Pump.fun template
The second camp copies the classic Pump.fun route. Tokens start on an internal bonding curve, and after reaching a market cap threshold they graduate and move liquidity to a DEX. The upside is easier cold-start support. The downside is that graduation rate becomes the defining metric.
Warp
Warp (@circlewarp) is described as the only Arc bonding-curve launchpad that has already completed the full graduation process. It uses a USDC-denominated curve. Once a token reaches roughly $69,000 in market cap, liquidity automatically migrates to WarpDex and the LP is burned.
Warp also leans on cross-chain access. Through Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, or CCTP, USDC from Ethereum, Base, and Arbitrum can be used to buy newly launched Arc tokens in one step. The page shows zero bridge fees.
The platform says it has launched 286 tokens and processed $2.15 million in cumulative volume. But the breakdown is much less broad than the topline suggests: around 84% of that volume came from Warp’s own token, WARP, and only one token graduated over a six-week span. The article identified the graduation threshold as the platform’s biggest weakness for cold-start meme launches.
WARP contract: 0x384c60f98ecd4c26345499345c03d677e40f115e. Reported market cap: about $870,000.
Flipt
Flipt (@Fliptfun) has not opened its mainnet product yet, but its testnet is live and, according to the article, currently carries the highest interaction heat. The core design change is on the sell side. Buyers do not receive a freely dumpable balance. They receive a bonded position, and after graduation they share pool fees according to their stake.
To exit, users must queue publicly for 90 seconds. Large withdrawals are visible to everyone. The report framed that as a shift from hidden dumping to fully exposed exits.
Its graduation raise line is about $6,375, with a graduation market cap of around $30,000. Trading fees on the curve are 1.25%, of which 0.75% goes to the bonder. The testnet runs in a 48-hour window. Each wallet can claim 500,000 test USDC, and final rankings earn gold, silver, and bronze NFTs to be minted after mainnet goes live. No platform token has been announced.
Model three: social bot issuance directly on X
Archemist (@Archemistdotfun) represents a social launch model built around bots. The pitch is simple: users do not need to open a website. They can create, launch, and trade a token by tagging a bot on X, while liquidity is locked automatically.
The platform also pushes creator economics hard. Creators can receive as much as 80% of trading fees, a structure clearly aimed at attracting issuers.
The article put Archemist’s cumulative early-environment trading volume at about $337,000 across roughly 49 launched tokens. Around 77% of that volume came from its own platform token, ARCH. Its homepage also says it has worked with Blockscout on token information verification, allowing contract details for each token to be checked directly through the explorer.
There is an important caveat. At the time of writing, the website counter showed zero volume and zero tokens, which the report said likely reflected a reset before the public mainnet switch. That lowers the reference value of the earlier trading figures. ARCH’s contract address and market cap were not publicly available and will need to be checked again after launch.
Model four: Uniswap V4 launchpads trying to build rewards into the trading layer
The next camp includes ubi.fun (@ubidotfun) and Minara (@minarafun). Their common bet is Uniswap V4. Through V4 hooks, the report said, launchpads can write dynamic fees, holder rewards, and automatic buybacks directly into the trading layer instead of leaning on token-tax designs. It is one of the newer technical pitches in the field, but also one of the coldest in terms of current activity.
ubi.fun
ubi.fun calls itself the only Uniswap V4 launchpad on Arc. Token creation is free, and trading fees are shared with creators and eligible holders, aiming for what the platform describes as broad holder rewards. The website explicitly says there is no platform token at this stage.
The early numbers are thin. Trades shown in the platform feed are mostly small buys between tens of dollars and about $200. The most recent launch was six days before the article. A third-party tally cited in the report counted only three tokens and about $4,800 in total volume, with the holder reward pool at one point containing just $1.38. The conclusion in the piece was blunt: the design may be interesting, but money has not tested it yet.
Minara
Minara is also built on Uniswap V4 and markets native USDC liquidity with low-friction token launches. Community chatter has linked it to Circle Ventures, but the article said the team has never confirmed that connection and the claim should be treated as rumor only.
The website is already online, yet its token list is mostly empty. There is no platform token and no trading data yet. One third-party review cited in the report said Minara’s rules allow creators to take up to about 80% of the supply at launch, a design the article said is unfriendly to buyers and worth monitoring once the public mainnet opens.
Model five: stock-token pairs and other outliers
Two other names in the roundup did not fit neatly into the four buckets above and were treated separately because their mechanics and risks differ more sharply.
Long.supply
Long.supply (@Longdotsupply) does not build meme/USDC pairs. Instead, it pairs meme tokens with stock tokens. The setup described in the article is to bridge stock tokens such as CRCL and NVDA, and even pre-IPO Anthropic exposure, into Arc through its own bridge, then list meme pairs against those assets.
The platform’s token, LONG, has contract address 0x2164bb17a2d38c1b5170e987b2c0416df1efc752. The report said its market cap had climbed to about $3.61 million, the highest among the launchpad tokens covered. Funds shown inside the bridge were around $1.6 million.
The unresolved issue is what these so-called stock assets actually are. The article said they are not compliant stock tokens of the kind associated with Robinhood. They are credentials minted by the project itself. Who holds the underlying assets, whether holders can redeem for actual shares, and whether the team can shut the bridge off unilaterally have not been publicly answered.
act.fun
act.fun (@actfunxyz) stood out for timing. The platform had not fully opened before, but it already used its own product to complete a presale for its platform token, ACT, which ended on Sept. 14.
The report said the full $30,000 target was filled across both tranches. The Architect tranche was priced at a $50,000 FDV, and the Public tranche at a $200,000 FDV. ACT’s contract is 0x177b47be2782575284211A000EDA4112807288a5. Its formal launch is scheduled for Sept. 16, the same day Arc opens its gates to the public, with claim and refund functions going live at the same time.
That said, the article flagged a contract-level issue. On-chain code checks showed that the contract owner still retained an emergency withdrawal privilege. Until that right is renounced, any statement that LP will be locked remains only a promise. The report also noted that parts of the page had the feel of AI-generated coding work.
What to watch after public mainnet opens
After running through the field, the report made a broader point: nearly all current volume and market cap figures are previews generated by a few hundred addresses willing to pay a premium to enter a restricted environment. The real test begins on Sept. 16, when the gate opens.
TechFlow highlighted three near-term checkpoints.
- First, whether any launchpad can produce independent trading in tokens other than its own platform coin. Tolly, Warp, and Archemist all remain heavily tied to their native tokens. A launchpad that can surface a meme token with turnover unrelated to its house asset would stand out quickly.
- Second, whether launch promises are kept. The article specifically pointed to Flipt’s mainnet plans, act.fun’s LP lock and permission renunciation, and aka.fun’s "see you on the 16th" messaging as claims that will be verified or disproved within 48 hours.
- Third, whether Arc itself performs on opening day. The report said it remains unclear whether official RPC access, the block explorer, and Uniswap integrations will all be available to the public on time, and whether USDC can move in and out smoothly.
The piece closed with a standard but direct warning: all of the projects mentioned are in a very early stage, most of the contracts have not been audited, and private-mainnet data does not predict public-mainnet performance. Users are expected to do their own research.
