The ARC token: what Circle has said
A separate token exists, it is not the gas, it was sold privately, and nothing has been announced for the public. This page keeps those four facts apart from everything people are guessing.
- ARC exists as a token, and it is not the gas. USDC remains the gas token on Arc. ARC is described by Circle as a coordination asset for governance, network security and the eventual proof-of-stake transition.
- A private presale happened. In May 2026 a $222 million private sale at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation was reported, led by a16z with participation from institutions including BlackRock, Apollo, ICE, ARK and Standard Chartered Ventures. It was the first token presale by a publicly listed company.
- No public sale has been announced.
- No airdrop has been announced. Circle has said it intends to move to distributed, community-driven governance with expanded validator participation. That is the usual context for a distribution, and it is also not a promise of one.
Circle needs a distributed validator set to reach proof of stake by its stated 2028 date, and staking needs a token in many hands. That makes a distribution to early users plausible. Plausible is the whole of the claim; nothing on this site will describe an airdrop as expected, likely or confirmed until Circle does.
Price discovery has already happened at the presale valuation. Anyone reasoning about the token should start from that number rather than from the launch-day price of anything else on the chain.
- Any ARC token trading on the gated mainnet or on any other chain today is not the ARC that Circle sold. Tokens named ARC, Arc, or a variant appear in scanner lists; the terminal shows them with the rest and rates none of them.
- Any claim page, "eligibility checker" or bridge that asks you to sign a transaction to "claim ARC" is a drain until Circle says otherwise on arc.io or circle.com.
- Any message that arrives by DM is a scam by default.
- Arc, Circle's official site
- Circle pressroom - token and governance statements
- Arc House community blog
Chain facts on this page come only from Circle. Where a figure is the site's own reading, the terminal card it comes from is linked. Definitions are on the method page.