Eight rails. Six actor types. One token sitting at the centre of value capture.
A deep read on the economic primitives behind Circle's Arc network.
Arc isn't one product. It's a stack of five layered economic primitives — settlement, consensus, programmability, distribution, governance. Most chains build one. Arc's design captures fee in all five.
Every protocol earns its keep by aligning incentives across multiple roles. Arc's design has six. Each pays in a different currency. Each extracts a different kind of value.
A token has utility only if removing it breaks something. We map ARC's five economic functions, then test which ones bind for which actors.
A token is only useful if it's required by enough actors. Higher intensity = harder to substitute away from ARC. Validators are locked in; end users barely touch it.
10B genesis. 60% to community, 25% to team & investors, 15% to treasury. We model the supply curve under bear / base / bull demand and run sensitivity on six parameters.
The fee router determines what fraction of every fee buys ARC, what burns, and what flows to stakers. The relative weight of these dials is the entire tokenomic argument.
Inflation, burn, stake ratio, and fee velocity together set the price equation. Drag to see how the supply curve responds.
Token demand is a force balance. Four upward groups (structural, behavioural, external, programmatic). One downward force (suppressors). The thesis stands or falls on which group dominates at each market regime.
Three primary distribution channels seed initial supply. Their weighting determines who has the political power in early governance.
Decentralisation is a path, not a state. Arc's governance evolves through five phases over ~5 years. Three terminal outcomes are possible. Four historical analogs tell us which is most likely.
Every meaningful research document terminates in honest uncertainty. These are the questions that determine whether the thesis works. Grouped by category, filterable. Filter to find the ones that bind for you.