Arc charges gas in USDC at 18 decimals at the protocol level. Mainnet fees follow an EIP-1559 style market with a minimum base fee of 20 gwei, targeting roughly $0.01 per transaction. The interesting part is not the number — it is that the number is denominated in dollars and stays denominated in dollars.
How is gas priced on Arc?
The fee token is USDC, with 18 decimals, handled at the protocol level rather than through a paymaster or a relayer bolted on top. When a transaction executes, the fee is deducted in USDC. There is no separate native coin to acquire, hold, or top up.
Arc mainnet prices gas with an EIP-1559 style fee market: each transaction pays a base fee that is burned and an optional priority fee to the block producer. Circle's documentation describes the base fee adjusting via an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) of recent block usage rather than the simple block-to-block adjustment Ethereum mainnet uses, which smooths spikes from short bursts of demand. The protocol enforces a minimum base fee of 20 gwei of USDC. Circle's published reference point is a per-transaction cost of roughly $0.01 — cents or less for ordinary transfers and contract calls, with heavier deployments costing more in the same proportional way they do on any EVM chain.
On the public testnet, before mainnet launched, average transaction cost had run lower, around $0.004 — that figure was a testnet average under lighter, subsidized conditions and should not be read as a mainnet number. The mainnet reference to budget against is Circle's ~$0.01-per-transaction figure.
Why does a dollar-denominated fee token matter?
Because it removes an entire class of operational overhead.
Budgeting becomes arithmetic. A launch plan involving a deployment, a set of liquidity locks, a vesting schedule and a distribution run can be costed in dollars in advance, and the number is still correct next month. On a chain with a volatile gas token, the same plan is a moving target that depends on an asset you did not want exposure to.
Treasury stops carrying an operational asset. Companies running on other chains hold an inventory of the gas token purely to keep the lights on, which means marking it, occasionally hedging it, and explaining it to a finance function that has no interest in owning it. Arc removes the position.
Accounting reconciles cleanly. Fees are already in the unit of account. There is no conversion at the moment of spend and no realised gain or loss on the gas balance.
Nobody gets stranded. The classic EVM failure — holding a valuable token and being unable to move it because the gas balance hit zero — is structurally different when the gas balance is the dollar balance. If you have money, you can transact.
Where does the USDC come from?
On mainnet, from Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP): Circle burns USDC on the chain it leaves and mints native USDC on Arc, so the arriving balance is Circle-issued rather than a bridge wrapper. There is no mainnet faucet — mainnet USDC has to be bridged in or otherwise acquired. The bridging flow is here.
Either way there is no bootstrap problem: you do not need chain-specific gas before you can receive chain-specific gas. That is why bridging to Arc needs no separate "get gas" step.
What does this cost in practice for a token launch?
The honest answer is: not enough to change any decision. At roughly a penny a transaction, the network cost of minting a token, locking a pool, creating a vesting schedule and running an airdrop to a few thousand wallets stops being a budget line and becomes a rounding error.
That has a second-order effect worth naming. When distribution is cheap, there is no cost excuse for skipping the parts of a launch that protect holders — locking the liquidity properly, vesting the team allocation over a real schedule, distributing to the actual holder set rather than a truncated list. On expensive chains those steps get trimmed. On Arc they cost almost nothing.
Team Finance handles that sequence: mint, lock liquidity, vest the team, airdrop. Non-custodial since 2020, with more than $2.7 billion secured across 40,000+ projects on 26 chains.
Does the fee model change post-launch?
USDC-denominated gas is the defining design decision of the chain, not a testnet convenience — it is the property that makes Arc legible to the institutions in its validator set, who cannot easily justify holding a volatile operational asset. Circle has not signalled any plan to change that. Mainnet chain ID 5042 (0x13b2), RPC at https://rpc.mainnet.arc.io and the explorer at https://explorer.arc.io are documented at docs.arc.io.
What about the ARC token — will that become gas?
There is no ARC token. Circle's May 2026 whitepaper described a potential coordination asset covering staking, governance and fee mechanics in explicitly exploratory terms. No launch, no decision. Anything trading under that ticker today is not Circle's. The full breakdown is here.
Even in the whitepaper's own description, the role sketched is coordination and security rather than replacing USDC at the fee layer.
Sources: docs.arc.io (fee model, EIP-1559/EWMA base fee, minimum base fee, per-transaction cost reference) · Circle pressroom · explorer.arc.io.
Last verified: September 16, 2026