Arc, the EVM-compatible layer-1 blockchain developed by Circle, the issuer of USDC, went live on mainnet on September 16, 2026, with eleven institutional founding validators already committed. The launch caps a development cycle that began with a public testnet in October 2025 and places the network's RPC layer — the interface through which applications read chain data and submit transactions — at the center of whether regulated builders can ship on day one.

Arc is purpose-built for stablecoin-native finance, covering payments, foreign exchange (FX), treasury operations, tokenized assets, and capital-markets settlement. The public testnet ran from October 2025, with institutional participants including BlackRock, Visa, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and Mastercard testing integrations ahead of launch.

Mainnet opened on September 16, 2026 with eleven founding validators operating alongside Circle: BlackRock, DTCC (the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation), Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE (Intercontinental Exchange), Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, and Visa. The lineup spans asset management, exchange operation, central clearing, banking, payments, and remittances — consistent with a mandate aimed at banks, payment networks, and licensed fintechs.

Unlike many layer-1 networks that launch while still searching for a use case, Arc shipped with a defined mandate: enabling banks, payment networks, and licensed fintechs to settle stablecoin-denominated payments, FX transactions, and tokenized assets on-chain. The arrangement puts issuance of USDC and development of the chain it settles on in the same company's hands. That mandate changes what the underlying infrastructure must deliver. Retail-optimized RPC services — the kind that ship with rate limits, best-effort uptime, and no archive access — cannot support workloads in which a dropped call leaves a settlement half-recorded or a compliance check unverifiable. At this scale, cheap or unproven infrastructure costs more than it saves, the publication argues.

What Arc Workloads Need From RPC

Before selecting a provider, teams building on Arc should evaluate four criteria that separate infrastructure suited to regulated stablecoin-finance workloads from the rest.

Deterministic latency that matches the chain's own finality. Arc pairs Reth, which executes transactions, with Malachite, a consensus system that finalizes blocks in roughly half a second. Once enough validators agree on a block, it is final — it is not reorganized or reversed later. That speed only delivers a benefit if the RPC layer keeps pace: submitting a transaction and confirming its status must happen within the same half-second window, or Arc's speed advantage is lost further up the stack. For payment and FX applications coordinating settlement windows, endpoint response time — not fees — becomes the practical bottleneck.

Archive and tracing access from day one. Custodians and payment processors settling USDC-denominated transactions need continuous access to historical balance and transaction data — not for user experience, but for the audit trail their regulator will request quarterly. If archive access is missing or unreliable, positions at prior blocks cannot be reconstructed, the audit becomes a manual reconciliation exercise, and the license goes on review. Banks running compliance checks on tokenized-asset transfers face the same constraint.

Data sovereignty options. A significant portion of Arc's stablecoin-finance infrastructure will be built by regulated banks, payment networks, and licensed institutions that cannot place customer-linked transaction data on third-party infrastructure at all, regardless of a provider's SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certifications. That requirement rules out most RPC providers immediately; the exception is teams offering a self-hosted deployment path in which nodes run inside the customer's own environment.

Compliance-grade attestations. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are no longer premium features for institutional infrastructure — they are baseline requirements for vendor risk review at any regulated buyer, and Arc's founding validator list consists almost entirely of that type of buyer.

How Chainstack Supports Arc

Infrastructure provider Chainstack supports Arc on both mainnet and testnet, with full debugging and tracing tools built in and out-of-the-box compatibility with widely used developer libraries including ethers.js, viem, and web3.py, according to the company. Chainstack added Arc testnet support in July 2026 and extended it to mainnet at launch; further details are available on the company's official Arc page.

Chainstack states it is currently the only infrastructure provider offering managed, dedicated, and self-hosted deployment on Arc from a single control plane. It both SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications and serves more than 100,000 developers across 70+ blockchain networks, including every network Arc builders are likely to bridge to or settle against.

The company offers Arc support across three deployment models, each matching a different operational profile:

Global Nodes — geo-balanced, auto-scaling RPC endpoints backed by a 99.99% uptime SLA. The same infrastructure powers production wallets, consumer-facing payment apps, and fintech integrations where variable load and fast time-to-market matter more than dedicated single-tenant guarantees.
Dedicated Nodes — isolated high-performance instances with no per-request billing, full node configuration control, and full debugging and tracing tools. This tier targets trading desks, FX and treasury systems, and high-throughput indexers that depend on deterministic performance under load as the binding constraint.

Chainstack Self-Hosted — a system for running Arc's Reth and Malachite infrastructure inside the customer's own cloud, on-premises environment, or bare metal, with Chainstack handling deployment, monitoring, updates, and recovery. New nodes start from a snapshot, so they come online quickly instead of re-downloading the entire chain history. This is the deployment model banks, payment networks, and regulated institutions reach for when customer-linked transaction data cannot leave their environment.

Testnet USDC remains available through Circle's own faucet for teams still evaluating the network on testnet. Chainstack's platform also ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets developers query Arc data and provision nodes directly from Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, ChatGPT, Codex, and Gemini — reducing the time between prompt and production endpoint to a single natural-language exchange.

Final Thoughts

According to the company, the combination of testnet-through-mainnet Arc support, three deployment models including self-hosted, and dual SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 attestations makes Chainstack a complete option for teams building production stablecoin-finance workloads in 2026. For banks, payment networks, and licensed institutions that require archive data, tracing, a self-hosted option, and the compliance attestations their regulator will ask about, Chainstack's Self-Hosted and dedicated Arc product lines are presented as the closest match to what stablecoin-native finance needs from its infrastructure layer. With mainnet live, the evaluation for teams that have been testing since October 2025 now shifts to whether a provider's endpoints hold up against the four criteria above under production load.

Source: Blockonomi