Can Circle’s Arc Repeat Robinhood Chain’s Meme Coin Boom?

Circle’s Arc network is set to open its public mainnet on September 16, and the question already circulating among analysts is whether it will see anything like the meme coin frenzy that hit Robinhood Chain right after its own launch.

SoSoValue’s breakdown of Arc argues that the answer is no, because the same structural features built to satisfy banks and regulators also strip out the exact mechanics that made Robinhood Chain’s boom possible in the first place.

Why Robinhood Chain’s Playbook Doesn’t Transfer to Arc

SoSoValue pointed to four conditions that lined up for Robinhood Chain: the network operator earned revenue from meme trading and tolerated it, an existing retail user base gave speculators an easy entry point, a native token’s buyback-and-burn mechanism supported prices, and a fully public mempool let bots front-run and sandwich trades for profit.

None of that lines up for Arc. Its validator set is Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, DTCC, Circle itself and seven other regulated institutions, all of which have more to lose reputationally from hosting meme speculation than they’d gain in fees.

Arc’s distribution channels run through card networks and asset managers rather than retail traders. Furthermore, the ARC token hasn’t launched, gas is paid in USDC, and there’s no buyback mechanism to prop anything up.

Arc has also closed its public mempool entirely, so the front-running infrastructure that funds a lot of launchpad activity elsewhere is simply not there.

Crypto analyst Adam Cochran put the underlying critique rather bluntly, calling Arc “a private consortium chain with preapproved validators” rather than a real layer 1.

But SoSoValue didn’t dismiss the possibility outright, since Arc is EVM-compatible and Uniswap v4 and Aerodrome are launching on it on day one, but it treats any meme rally on Arc as harder to start and easier to unwind than what happened on Robinhood Chain.

Robinhood Chain’s Own Boom Already Cooling

The comparison matters because Robinhood Chain’s boom has already turned over, with daily revenue falling from a peak of $4 million to $1.06 million by the end of last week.

That was an 83% drop that came as gas prices collapsed once meme congestion eased and a 90-day fee subsidy nears its September 29 expiration. CEO Vlad Tenev had originally pitched tokenized real-world assets as the chain’s intended direction, then, once meme trading took over the network, said it was “good for memes, too.”