Arc

Arc is Circle’s Layer 1 blockchain, built around USDC. Coven runs on Arc mainnet, chain ID 5042.

Gas is USDC

There is no separate gas token. Transactions are paid for in USDC, which means a wallet holding only USDC can trade, bridge and approve without acquiring anything else first.

Two consequences worth designing around:

• Spending your entire USDC balance leaves nothing for the next transaction. Coven’s swap does not reserve gas for you, so a “max” button in your interface should hold a little back. The Coven app keeps 0.5 USDC.
• USDC arriving from another chain immediately covers gas, so a new user can bridge in and trade without a faucet or a swap for gas.

Two ways to see USDC

Arc’s USDC exists as the chain’s native balance and as an ERC-20 at 0x3600000000000000000000000000000000000000. Both are the same money. The ERC-20 view reports 6 decimals, matching USDC everywhere else, while the native view uses 18. Coven uses the ERC-20 interface everywhere, so amounts are always in 6 decimals.

Fast blocks and final results

Blocks arrive about every half second, and a block that lands is final. There are no reorganizations to design around, so a confirmed swap stays confirmed, and a newly created pool never disappears.

This is also why new pairs show up so quickly. Coven polls for new pools once a second and typically reports one within a second or two of its creation.

What runs there

Uniswap v3 and v4 are both deployed on Arc, along with Circle’s CCTP contracts for moving USDC to other chains. Trading is busy: thousands of new pools are created every hour, most of them launchpad tokens paired with USDC.

Connecting

Setting	Value
Chain ID	5042
RPC	https://rpc.mainnet.arc.io
Explorer	https://explorer.arc.io
Gas token	USDC

The public RPC rate-limits heavy use. Anything serving real traffic should use its own endpoint, which the SDK accepts through arcTransport.