BlockBeats News, May 11th, today Circle officially released the ARC Whitepaper, outlining ARC as the design framework for Arc blockchain network's native coordinating asset.

Reportedly, Arc is a public Layer 1 blockchain, positioned as the "Economic Operating System of the Internet," providing shared, composable infrastructure to support economic contracts, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and global market operation.

ARC is the utilitarian native asset of the Arc network, aligning participants with the network's long-term success through staking, governance, fee capture, and platform-level utilities. ARC does not represent any equity, debt, profit-sharing rights, or asset claims of Circle; its economic value is derived entirely from participants' interaction with the Arc network. ARC fulfills five structural functions: Economic Alignment (staking and security), Platform Utility (discounts and priority access), Fee Capture and Distribution, Governance, and expanding utility features as the platform scales.

· Supply and Inflation: ARC's initial token supply is 10 billion. It adopts an early diminishing inflation model (expected initial annualized around 2-3%), rewarding validators and stakers. The long-term goal is to completely offset new issuance through network activity burn, achieving "inflation neutrality."

· Fee Conversion: Regardless of the asset users use (such as USDC) to pay protocol fees, it will be programmatically converted to ARC at the protocol layer, then split into two parts: part allocated to validators and stakers as compensation, and part permanently burned to offset inflation.

· Allocation Scheme: 60% allocated to the ecosystem (token sales, developer grants, network growth); 25% allocated to Circle (protocol development, staking, governance); 15% allocated to a long-term reserve (strategic flexibility and economic stability).

On the governance front, after Arc upgrades to a PoS mechanism, economic parameters (fees, inflation, burn logic) will be decided by ARC stakers through governance voting. Protocol upgrades, security event response, validator membership management, and other matters will initially be managed by Circle and gradually transition to token-holder governance as the network matures.

The Arc public testnet launched in October 2025, has processed 2.441 billion transactions as of May 5, 2026. The mainnet is expected to launch in the summer of 2026.