A bonding curve is a pricing function wearing a market's clothes. A concentrated liquidity position is a market with its inventory placed on purpose. Among the launch venues arriving with [Arc](/arc/what-is-arc), the venues that have published their mechanism chose the second, and that choice decides more about a token's first month than anything on the front end.
Arc is a Layer 1 blockchain built by Circle, the issuer of USDC. It uses USDC as its gas token and launches its public mainnet on 16 September 2026. Uniswap's concentrated-liquidity contracts are due on the chain from the first block, which is why a mechanism that once required a bespoke launch contract is set to be a new chain's default. What follows is the mechanical account of it, and Bullcheese's single-sided launch — TrustSwap's own implementation, which launches on 16 September 2026, at hour zero of Arc mainnet — appears as an example rather than as the subject.
A range is not a curve, and a range can hold one asset
The design Uniswap introduced in V3 replaced liquidity spread thinly across every conceivable price with liquidity assigned to a bounded range. Inside that range the position behaves like an ordinary pool; outside it, it holds nothing but one of the two assets and does no trading at all.
That last property is the entire trick. A position holds all of one asset at one end of its range and all of the other at the opposite end, passing continuously between them as price crosses. Place the bounds so the current price is already outside them and the position can be funded with a single token, because a single token is all it can contain. Uniswap's own support page states the limitation plainly: a single-sided position earns no fees until the pool's price moves into its range.
A launch is the one situation where that costs nothing: there is no price yet, and nothing to earn fees from.
The range sits above spot because that is the only side the token can occupy
In a token/USDC pool, a range below the current price would have to be funded in USDC — precisely the capital a creator launching with nothing does not have. A range above it is funded entirely in the token being launched.
So the whole supply goes in above spot and the pool opens holding no USDC. The first buyer sends USDC and receives token out of the position's inventory. Price moves up, the pool acquires the USDC it never started with, and the position converts from all token into a mix as price advances. At the top bound, if it ever gets there, the supply has been sold into the market. What the creator supplies is not capital but a decision about where the bounds go — a real decision, and one this page returns to.
Price discovery happens in public, tick by tick, with no threshold to clear
A bonding curve prices trades against a formula inside a platform-held contract, and only a token that clears a graduation threshold ever reaches a public pool — a small single-digit percentage of them, by most published estimates. Until then there is no pool for an aggregator to route through and no chart reflecting anything but the formula.
A one-sided range has no such waiting room. Buys walk price upward through it by consuming token inventory at successively higher prices, the same mechanism every concentrated-liquidity venue uses for every other pair on the chain. The supply schedule is the shape of the range, fixed before the first trade and readable from contract state rather than from a launch page. From the first block the token is an ordinary pool, tradable by someone who has never heard of the venue that created it. The honest version of that claim is narrow: discovery through a range is not better than a curve's, but it happens in public, against liquidity a buyer can size beforehand, with no migration event to gap or stall.
What MintPlus does on the Team Finance side, in one transaction
MintPlus is Team Finance's launch flow and the clearest published description of this mechanism as a product. Its one-sided mode, per its own page, "uses 100% of your token supply to create the initial liquidity position."
The flow takes an initial market capitalisation from the creator and derives the pool's parameters from it, offering a choice between one-sided and dual-sided liquidity. It mints the token, opens the Uniswap V3 position and locks that position through Team Finance for a duration the creator sets, in one guided sequence rather than three separate contract interactions. Its contracts are audited by SolidProof, per the same page. The creator still needs a little USDC, because USDC is Arc's gas token — "no capital" here means no paired capital, not no gas. This is the layer Bullcheese is built on, and a creator can run it themselves. Check MintPlus's supported-chain list for Arc before you rely on this route on launch day.
The lock question and the fee question are not the same question
The word "locked" covers at least three outcomes on Arc, and the difference shows up in the creator's bank account. Burning destroys the position, and whatever it holds or has accrued becomes unreachable, permanently. "Permanently locked" means the position cannot be withdrawn, and says nothing on its own about whether the accrued fees can still be collected; that is a second decision, and a venue that has made it should be able to point to where it is written down. A term lock through a third-party vault holds the position until an unlock timestamp in contract state, and because V3 fees are credited to the position and paid out by an explicit collect call rather than compounded into the principal, a vault can permit that call while the principal stays immobile.
That separation is the whole of the argument. Burned liquidity earns you nothing, forever. Locked liquidity keeps paying. Bullcheese's vault separates fee collection from withdrawal: liquidity stays locked through Team Finance's audited contracts, and the fee stream stays claimable. The creator takes 75% of trading fees while the lock runs, and after 90 days the creator can relock the position and keep the whole fee stream.
Verify the position on-chain, because the launch page is not evidence
A one-sided launch leaves a specific trail: a token contract whose source should be verified, a pool address holding the position, and the transactions that opened it and moved it into a vault with an unlock date. All of it is readable on Arcscan, and the hub's Arcscan walkthrough starts from a ticker.
The lock is the record people check least carefully and the one worth checking first. How to verify a liquidity lock on Arc sets out what a genuine record carries — an amount, a contract, an unlock timestamp — and how that differs from a site that uses the word in a heading.
The strongest case against one-sided launching is that the creator picks the range
Here is the objection properly made. A curve's parameters are set by the platform and identical for every token on it, which is a form of fairness: nobody gets a bespoke pricing function. In a one-sided launch the creator chooses the bounds, and bounds are as powerful as any curve parameter. Set the lower bound well above any price the token could plausibly sustain and early buyers transact into thin inventory at prices nobody discovered. An out-of-range position also earns nothing, so a token that never trades up into its range produces exactly the fee stream a burned position would have. And the permanent-lock camp adds the fairest point of all: a term lock leaves the creator in the picture, while a burn removes them entirely.
None of that disappears. What changes is when it becomes visible. Range bounds are contract state, so a buyer can read the position's depth before buying — not true of a curve whose parameters are published as marketing. An unlock timestamp is contract state too. Burning removes a decision by destroying an asset; locking removes it by constraining one, checkable in the same place the burn would have been.
Arc's run-up to mainnet produced a field of venues describing themselves in nearly identical words. Its first month on mainnet is where the on-chain record can be checked against them — and the question worth asking of any of them now is not what the landing page claims about liquidity, but which function on which contract enforces it.
Bullcheese is a permissionless launch venue. Tokens launched on it are created by anyone, carry no endorsement, and can go to zero. Nothing here is financial advice.
Sources: as linked inline. Verified 14 September 2026.
Last verified: August 2026