Day-one DEX volume on Arc finished at around $82 million, compared with the $878 million Robinhood Chain did on July 12, when its own institutional pitch was overtaken by memecoins and a cat token briefly hit a $156 million market cap. Arc’s largest token, ARGUS, is worth $16 million. Its second- and third-largest are cirBTC and EURC — Circle’s own products.
The sharper criticism is that Circle invited this. Rachel Mayer, Circle’s VP of product for Arc, posted an AI-generated image promoting DUKE, a memecoin, writing that it was Allaire’s dog. The post drew about 1 million views and a wave of hostile replies accusing Circle of shilling tokens to bootstrap its own network.
“You can clearly see a lot of their team fundamentally misunderstands meme culture,” wrote Abbas Khan. “Now it’s stuck in this weird middle ground where nobody really knows whether it’s supposed to be a meme chain or a corporate stablecoin chain.”
Circle did not…
