Token Launch Checklist for Arc Mainnet: Sequence, Tools and Costs

A token launch checklist has four phases: decide the tokenomics, deploy and configure the contract, create and protect the market, then run distribution and operations. On Arc Mainnet the whole sequence is cheap — service fees are 50 USDC per tool and gas is a few cents in USDC — which means the expensive mistakes are sequencing errors rather than money.

This is the order to do things in, with the failure mode of each step noted so you can see why it is where it is.

Phase 0 — Decisions before anything is signed

Nothing here costs money, and skipping it costs the most.

• Supply and allocation. Total supply, what share goes to the pool, the treasury, the team, the community. Write the numbers down before you pick a supply that makes them look tidy.
• Does the token need to be mintable? If yes, decide the cap and the release schedule now. If no, you can launch with fixed supply and never revisit it.
• Tax model. Buy tax, sell tax, transfer behaviour, recipients. Remember that a tax token is still an ERC-20 and still trades in a Uniswap V2 pool, so the decision is economic, not technical.
• What the token is for. Governance, revenue share, access, a pure memecoin — each implies a different distribution and a different set of honest promises.
• Who owns the contract at the end. A wallet, a multisig, or nobody. Decide before you deploy, because the answer determines half the configuration.

If this phase is shaky, tokenomics that survive contact with the market is the companion read.

Phase 1 — Contract configuration and deployment

• Name, symbol, decimals decided (decimals are effectively permanent; 18 is the safe default)
• Supply model configured: fixed, or mintable with a hard cap
• Taxes set to their final values, with recipients you are happy to keep forever
• Max transaction and max wallet limits set — or deliberately disabled
• Anti-sniper window chosen, and a decision made about whether to use it at all
• Burn or deflation mechanics configured, or explicitly omitted
• Pair address, locker and treasury set as tax-exempt where the contract supports it
• Ownership decision made: keep it, or revoke at deployment
• Deployment submitted with Arc Token Launch

Failure mode: deploying, then discovering the configuration needs to be different. Everything above remains editable while the owner role exists, which is exactly why you should not revoke until the list is complete — see how to revoke token ownership.

Arc-specific: all transaction fees must meet the 20 Gwei maxFeePerGas floor. Below it, the mempool drops the transaction silently. Gas is paid in native USDC at 18 decimals, while the ERC-20 interface your pool touches is 6 decimals — the dual-interface explainer is required reading before you touch pool math.

Phase 2 — The market: pool, price and protection

A token without a pool is a contract address. This phase decides the opening price and who can change it.

• Pool capital decided. Size it against the trades you expect, not against a round number.
• Opening price and FDV calculated and written down, so the first chart candle matches your story.
• Liquidity seeded, either after deployment with the Arc Liquidity Pool Creator or atomically with Arc Bundle Launch.
• LP tokens committed — sent to the Arc Liquidity Locker with a public unlock date, or burned.
• First trade tested from a wallet that is not the deployer, including a sell.

Slippage is the number that makes pool capital concrete. In a constant-product pool the price impact of a buy of size dx against a USDC reserve of y is roughly dx / (y + dx):

Pool depth	$100 buy	$1,000 buy	$5,000 buy
10,000 USDC	0.99%	9.1%	33.3%
50,000 USDC	0.20%	1.96%	9.1%
150,000 USDC	0.07%	0.66%	3.2%

Failure mode: a pool too thin for your own community. Every buy becomes a price spike and every sell becomes a collapse, and neither is a scam — it is arithmetic. Read impermanent loss before you decide how much of your treasury goes in.

Failure mode: LP tokens left in a wallet while you announce the launch. Anyone can verify the LP holder on the Arc Explorer, and "unlocked liquidity" is the first thing every buyer checks. See lock liquidity vs burn.

Phase 3 — Distribution

• Eligibility rule written down (who qualifies and why)
• Snapshot block chosen — preferably retroactive so it cannot be farmed
• Holder list exported from Arc Token Snapshot, with pools and tooling contracts removed
• Amounts sized against the plan from Phase 0, not against how generous the post sounds
• Airdrop executed with the Arc Token Multisender, approve-then-send
• Team and treasury allocations sent to their vesting or lock destinations, and labelled publicly

Failure mode: airdropping before the pool is deep enough to absorb the selling. Full sequence and cost arithmetic in how to airdrop tokens on Arc.

Phase 4 — Post-launch operations

• Ownership revoked once configuration is final — Revoke Ownership
• Contract published and checked with the free token checker; every warning either resolved or explained
• Taxes and limits either left alone or changed once, deliberately, via the Arc Token Manager
• Any supply reduction done with Burn Tokens on Arc
• Liquidity plan for the next 90 days decided: additions, deeper pool, or none
• Concentration watched with repeat snapshots rather than assumed

Failure mode: revoking before the configuration is genuinely final, or leaving ownership in place while telling buyers it was revoked. Both are checkable in one contract read, and the second one ends communities.

The token launch checklist, with costs

Step	Tool	Service fee	Gas (illustrative)
Deploy token	Token Launch	50 USDC	~0.024 USDC
Create + seed pool	Pool Creator	50 USDC	~0.010 USDC
Lock LP tokens	Liquidity Locker	50 USDC	~0.003 USDC
Snapshot holders	Snapshot	Free	Free
Airdrop (optional)	Multisender	50 USDC	~0.24 USDC / 1,000 wallets
Revoke ownership	Revoke Ownership	50 USDC	~0.001 USDC
Check the token	Token Checker	Free	Free

A minimal launch is 100 USDC of service fees; a launch that also locks liquidity and revokes ownership is 200 USDC. The rest of your budget is pool capital, which stays yours. The itemised version is in what it costs to launch a token on Arc.

Arc-specific gotchas for launch day

1. Set maxFeePerGas at or above 20 Gwei. A transaction below the floor is dropped without an error or a receipt, which reads as "nothing happened".
2. Never mix the two USDC interfaces. 18 decimals for gas and msg.value, 6 decimals for the ERC-20 at 0x3600000000000000000000000000000000000000.
3. One confirmation is final. Arc has deterministic sub-second finality, so there is nothing to wait for and no reorg to undo a mistake.
4. Do not try to burn a native USDC balance. Transfers to address(0) revert. ERC-20 burn() is unaffected.
5. No onchain randomness. PREVRANDAO returns 0, so any "random" distribution you build has to bring an oracle.
6. Blob transactions are rejected. If your tooling defaults to type-3 for cheap data, disable it.
7. Import the Arc chain from @/config/chains, not from a generic chain list, if you are building your own tooling — the bundled definitions elsewhere may have an empty RPC array.

Announcement order

The sequence that works: pool exists, LP is locked or burned, the first outside buy has succeeded, the contract has been checked, and then the announcement — with the contract address, the pool address, the lock transaction and the launch configuration in one post. Announcing before the pool exists invites snipers to your first swap; announcing before the LP is committed invites a very short conversation about unlocked liquidity.

Once the whole list is done, the repeatable work begins: airdrops, snapshots, liquidity updates and burns, all priced per use at flat-fee pricing. Arctools is not affiliated with Circle or the Arc Foundation.