CIRCLE BUILT A CHAIN FOR INSTITUTIONS — TWO PROTOCOLS COLLECTED EVERY DOLLAR OF ITS FEES — AND CIRCLE’S OWN BRIDGE HOLDS $8,144

Circle launched Arc, a chain of its own, and the coverage went to the memecoins. Fair enough, that is what the first day looked like on the volume chart.

The balances tell a quieter story. At 10:05 this morning Eastern, DefiLlama put the value locked on Arc at $334.32 million. Two lending protocols hold almost all of it. Morpho Blue has $227.25 million and Aave V4 has $77.48 million. That is ninety-one percent of the chain sitting in two places.

Now the fees, which is where a chain tells you what it is actually for. Arc collected $505,423.20 in its first twenty-four hours. Uniswap collected $505,422 of it. Aave V4 collected one dollar and twenty cents. Every other protocol on the chain collected nothing at all.

Add those two and you get the whole number, to the cent.

The two memecoin launchpads that drew the headlines, arcpad.meme and SolonPad, hold $1,166.60 and $192.23. Real volume, maybe. Almost no balance.

And the line worth keeping. Circle built this chain. Circle Gateway, Circle’s own bridge onto it, holds $8,144.98.

Fifteen protocols are listed. Twelve of them earned nothing yesterday.

A chain on day one is not a verdict. But the receipts of a new network are public from the first block, which is the part worth noticing. Nobody had to take anyone’s word for any of this.