The Arc Mainnet glossary, in plain English
DeFi has enough vocabulary to make a simple action sound dangerous, and Arc adds a few terms of its own — two decimal systems for one USDC balance, a fee floor that silently drops cheap transactions, finality measured in milliseconds. Every definition below is written for someone using the tools, and links onward to the tool, guide or parameter it refers to.
Every term, grouped by what you are doing
Search a word, filter to a category, or read straight through. Groups follow the lifecycle of a token: the network it lives on, what it costs to move it, how it is created, how it is traded, how it is distributed, and how it goes wrong.
63 terms defined
Arc Mainnet
16 termsArc Mainnet
Circle's stablecoin Layer 1, and the network every Arctools service runs on. USDC is the native asset rather than ETH, the execution baseline is Ethereum's Osaka hard fork, and transactions finalise on inclusion with sub-second determinism. Chain id 5042, RPC https://rpc.mainnet.arc.io, explorer explorer.arc.io.
Arc Testnet
The rehearsal network for Arc, chain id 5042002, with test USDC from Circle's faucet. Uniswap is not deployed there, so Arctools' liquidity tools are mainnet-only; the deploy-and-manage tools are the ones worth rehearsing on testnet.
Chain id
The number that identifies which network a transaction belongs to and prevents replay across chains. Arc Mainnet is 5042, which is 0x13b2 in the hexadecimal form wallets ask for; Arc Testnet is 5042002, or 0x4cef52.
RPC endpoint
The HTTPS (or WebSocket) URL a wallet uses to read chain state and broadcast signed transactions. Arc's public endpoint is https://rpc.mainnet.arc.io; Alchemy, Blockdaemon, dRPC and QuickNode also operate Arc endpoints, and the URL is one of the five fields you enter when adding the network manually.
Arc Explorer
The official block explorer at explorer.arc.io. Paste a transaction hash to see exactly what a call did, or a contract address to read its bytecode, events and token balances — the fastest way to verify that a launch, a lock or a burn really happened.
Native USDC
The 18-decimal interface of Arc's native asset. It is what gas is priced in, what msg.value carries, and what your wallet shows as your balance. Because it is the native asset, there is no WETH-style wrapper and no wrapping step before you transact.
ERC-20 USDC
The 6-decimal interface of the same USDC balance, exposed at 0x3600000000000000000000000000000000000000 so ordinary ERC-20 code — transferFrom, approve, balanceOf, pool math — works unchanged. To convert a native figure to this interface, divide by 10 to the 12th; converting back multiplies by the same factor.
USDC gas token
On Arc the fee asset and the asset being moved are the same thing, which is why a launch costs a USDC balance rather than a volatile gas token. Base fees are paid to the block beneficiary rather than burned, and nothing needs to be bridged or swapped to top up for gas.
Deterministic finality
A transaction is final the moment it is included in a block, with no probabilistic confirmation window and no reorg. Offchain systems can act after a single confirmation, which is why Arctools waits for exactly one receipt and shows success immediately.
Osaka baseline
Arc targets Ethereum's Osaka hard fork as its execution baseline, so contracts and tooling written for modern Ethereum behave the same way — including EIP-7702 set-code transactions and CREATE2. When porting anything unusual, compare behaviour against Osaka rather than an older fork.
EIP-7708
Standard ERC-20 Transfer logs for native value movements, shipped on Arc ahead of Ethereum's own schedule. A plain native USDC send, a contract endowment or a self-destruct transfer emits a Transfer log from a system address; gas deductions do not. Useful for indexing, and a trap for anything that counts both native and ERC-20 events as separate inflows.
Precompile
A fixed address where the protocol provides behaviour instead of deployed bytecode — Arc's USDC ERC-20 interface is precompile-backed, and minting or burning native USDC goes through the native-coin precompile. Value-bearing transfers to a precompile address revert, so never send USDC to one.
Blob transaction
A type-3 transaction carrying EIP-4844 blob data for cheap L2 data availability. Arc does not support them: the mempool rejects type-3 transactions outright, BLOBHASH returns 0 and BLOBBASEFEE returns 1. Every Arctools transaction is a normal type-2 transaction.
PREVRANDAO
The opcode Solidity exposes as block.prevrandao, which on Ethereum mixes in beacon-chain randomness. On Arc it always returns 0, so there is no onchain randomness at all. Contracts that need an unpredictable number must use an oracle or a verifiable random function.
Multicall3
The canonical batching contract, deployed on Arc at 0xcA11bde05977b3631167028862bE2a173976CA11. It lets a frontend read dozens of values — balances, allowances, pool reserves, token metadata — in a single RPC round trip, which is how the Arctools forms populate themselves quickly.
Permit2
Uniswap's signature-based approval contract at 0x000000000022D473030F116dDEE9F6B43aC78BA3. It lets a spender move tokens with a signed message instead of an approve transaction, saving a step and gas; the contracts are still bounded by the amount and expiry you sign.
Fees & gas
6 termsGas
The unit that measures computational work. Every transaction declares a gas limit and a price per unit; gas used multiplied by the effective price is what leaves your balance. On Arc that balance is USDC, so gas is quoted in a stable unit rather than a volatile one.
Base fee
The per-block minimum price of a unit of gas. Arc's minimum base fee is 20 Gwei, the next block's base fee is published in the parent block header, and the fee collected is paid to the block beneficiary rather than burned.
20 Gwei fee floor
Arc's hard minimum for maxFeePerGas. A transaction priced below 20 Gwei is silently dropped by the mempool: no error, no receipt, and it never appears in a block, so the wallet just waits. Arctools caps every write up to the floor and attaches a 1 Gwei tip, which is why its transactions land.
maxFeePerGas
The ceiling you authorise for each unit of gas in a type-2 transaction. You are refunded the difference between it and the effective price, so setting it higher than the base fee is safe — but setting it below Arc's 20 Gwei floor means the transaction is never included at all.
Dropped transaction
A transaction the mempool never accepts, which on Arc is what happens when the max fee is below the 20 Gwei floor. It is not pending and it will never confirm; nothing was spent, so the fix is to resubmit at or above the floor.
Service fee
What Arctools charges for one use of a write tool: a flat 50 USDC, forwarded to the treasury inside the same transaction as the work. It is a value stored on each service contract, readable with fee(), capped by a 10,000 USDC ceiling compiled into that contract, and unchanged by the size of your launch or the number of wallets you pay.
Tokens & supply
14 termsERC-20
The fungible token standard: a fixed set of functions for balances, transfers and approvals. Every token Arctools deploys is an ERC-20, which is why it works with Arc wallets, Uniswap on Arc and the Arc Explorer without any special support.
Token decimals
How many decimal places a token's smallest unit implies — 18 is the convention, 6 is what USDC's ERC-20 interface uses. Decimals do not change the value of a token or its supply, only how balances are displayed and scaled, but mixing them up in a calculation is off by a factor of ten to the power of the difference.
Total supply
Every unit of a token that exists, including units held by contracts, treasuries and locked addresses. Burning reduces it permanently; minting increases it, which is why mint authority is the first thing a token checker looks at.
Circulating supply
The portion of total supply that is actually available to trade — the figure a market capitalisation is usually calculated from. It is a judgement call rather than an onchain value, so a price quoted from total supply will read higher than one quoted from circulating supply.
Supply cap
The upper bound on how many units can ever exist. A fixed-supply token has a cap equal to its total supply, and a token deployed with no cap and a live mint authority can be inflated later — the difference the Token Checker reports as mintable.
Mint authority
The right to create new supply. If it is live and controlled by a wallet, the holder can dilute everyone else; if it is revoked or held by a contract with no mint path, supply is fixed. On a renounced token, the launch template freezes it permanently.
Burn
Destroying tokens so they can never be spent again, which reduces total supply. ERC-20 burn() works normally on Arc; what the network forbids is burning the native asset, because native USDC is the gas token. Use the Burn tool to reduce supply and prove it onchain.
Deflationary token
A token whose supply falls over time — typically by destroying a share of every transfer, or by burning from a treasury on a schedule. It is a supply mechanic, not a price guarantee; demand still decides what the remaining units are worth.
Buy and sell tax
A transfer tax that applies when a token is bought from, or sold into, a pool, usually split between marketing, development, liquidity and burn recipients. The Arctools launch template caps it at 10% per direction, and a taxed token needs a fee-on-transfer-aware router function to be sellable through a pool.
Fee-on-transfer token
A token where the amount that arrives is smaller than the amount sent, because a tax is taken in transit. Standard swap functions assume an exact balance change and revert against such tokens, so pools and routers need the variant that measures what actually arrived. Adding liquidity for a taxed token also requires the sender to be exempt.
Tax exemption
An address allowed to move a taxed token without paying the tax — the deployer, the router and the pair itself during setup. Without it, moving tokens into a new pool would forfeit part of your own liquidity before the pool existed.
Max wallet limit
A cap on how much of the supply one address may hold, usually expressed in basis points — 2,000 bps is 20% — and often also applied to a single transaction. It limits concentration and whale accumulation, and it can be a snare: a limit set low enough can block large buyers, and on a renounced token it cannot be raised again.
Anti-sniper window
A period immediately after trading opens during which pool buys are rejected, intended to stop bots from taking the first cheap fills. It only protects the opening seconds; it does nothing about the price your liquidity was seeded at, which is what a bundle launch is for.
Renounce ownership
Giving up the owner role so that no one — including you — can change the contract's configuration again. It is irreversible, it freezes taxes, limits and recipients exactly as they were, and it removes the single most common warning a token checker raises. Arctools' own service contracts use two-step ownership so a mistyped transfer cannot brick them; renouncing is always explicit.
Launches
7 termsToken launch
Deploying an ERC-20 to Arc Mainnet and nothing else. The token lands in your wallet with trading closed until you enable it, leaving you free to create the pool whenever you choose — the right call when you want the contract onchain before you finalise the liquidity plan.
Bundle launch
Packaging the deploy, the Uniswap pool creation, the initial liquidity and coordinated buys from up to 40 wallets into one atomic transaction. Because the pool never exists in a block without the bundle, nobody can buy into your liquidity before you do — the opening price is whatever you configured.
Atomic transaction
A transaction that either completes every step or reverts all of them, with no partial state in between. It is what makes a bundle launch snipe-proof and what makes a multisender airdrop all-or-nothing: there is no half-finished version to clean up.
Sniper
A bot that watches for new liquidity and buys in the first available block, taking the cheapest tokens purely because it was faster than everyone else. The counter is not a faster bot but a different shape of launch: making the pool and the first buys inseparable so there is no cheap block to take.
Bundle wallet
One of the addresses that receives part of the bundled buy in a bundle launch. Up to 40 per launch, each with an optional maximum allocation, and every wallet's purchase is visible on the Arc Explorer afterwards.
Initial FDV
Fully diluted valuation at the moment the pool opens: the opening token price multiplied by the total supply. It is the headline number a launch model produces, and it is only as honest as the supply figure behind it — a small float against a large supply makes a modest FDV look cheap on price alone.
Launch model
The planner in the launch tools that turns your inputs — pool capital, the share of supply placed in the pool, bundle capital, wallet count — into estimates of opening price, FDV, the share of supply the bundle captures and the average entry. It is constant-product arithmetic, and it excludes swap fees, gas and execution slippage.
Liquidity
11 termsLiquidity pool
A contract holding two assets that anyone can trade against, with the price determined by the ratio between them. A pool is not an order book: there is no counterparty waiting, the contract itself takes the other side of every trade at the price the curve dictates.
Constant product formula
The rule behind every Uniswap V2 pool: the product of the two reserves stays constant across trades, so buying one asset makes it more expensive and selling makes it cheaper. It is why the deposit ratio determines the opening price, and why large trades move the price more than small ones.
LP token
The ERC-20 a pool mints to you when you add liquidity. It represents a proportional claim on the pool's reserves — your share of everything in it — and it is what you must hold, lock or burn to control the liquidity. Because it is a normal token in your wallet, adding and removing liquidity is really just depositing and redeeming it.
Liquidity depth
How much capital sits in a pool, which decides how far a trade moves the price. Thin pools can be pushed several percent by an ordinary buy; deep pools absorb the same order with almost no movement. Depth is also a safety signal — a token whose entire liquidity is a few hundred USDC is one withdrawal away from being untradeable.
Swap fee
The cut a pool takes from every trade, paid to its liquidity providers. Uniswap V2 pairs on Arc charge 0.30%; V3 pools exist at 0.01%, 0.05%, 0.30% and 1.00%. Fees accrue inside the pool and are realised when you remove liquidity.
Price impact
How much your own trade moves the pool price, purely because of its size relative to the reserves. It is calculable before you sign and is separate from slippage: impact is the price you cause, slippage is the difference between the quote and the fill.
Slippage
The gap between the amount a quote promises and the amount a trade actually delivers, usually caused by other trades landing first. The tolerance you set is a ceiling, not a target: if the pool moves beyond it, the transaction reverts instead of filling at a worse price.
Impermanent loss
The cost of providing liquidity instead of holding: the pool sells the asset that rises and buys the one that falls, so the position ends up worth less than the untouched holdings whenever the price ratio changes. The loss is not realised until you withdraw, and swap fees can offset it — with a large one-directional move they often do not.
Liquidity lock
Depositing LP tokens into a contract that will not release them before a published date. It does not make a token safe by itself, but it converts 'trust me not to pull the pool' into a verifiable fact: anyone can read the lock, the amount and the unlock timestamp onchain. The Arctools locker enforces a minimum and maximum duration chosen when it was deployed, and exposes no withdrawal escape hatch.
Liquidity burn
Sending LP tokens to an address nobody controls, so the liquidity can never be withdrawn — the strongest form of the lock, with no date and no key. It is irreversible, and it is not the same as Arc's rule against native value transfers to 0x0: that rule governs the native asset, while an ERC-20 transfer to a burn address is an ordinary token transfer.
Uniswap V2 and V3 on Arc
Both Uniswap generations are deployed on Arc Mainnet. V2 pools are constant-product pairs with fungible LP tokens — what Arctools' liquidity tools build and manage; V3 adds concentrated positions as NFTs across four fee tiers. The addresses of the factories, routers and position manager are listed in the network hub.
Distribution
5 termsMultisender
A contract that pays many recipients in one transaction. Arctools' multisender handles ERC-20 airdrops, per-recipient amounts and native USDC payouts, up to 200 recipients per call, and never takes custody: tokens move from your wallet straight to each recipient, and a failure reverts the whole batch.
Airdrop
Distributing tokens or USDC to a list of wallets, usually as a reward, a claim on a past snapshot or a launch-day giveaway. The two things that decide whether it goes well are where the recipient list came from and whether the batch is atomic — both of which you can check before signing.
Snapshot
A record of who held what at a specific block. Because balances change with every block, an airdrop list is only fair if it is pinned to a block you announced in advance; the Snapshot tool reads that state, reports concentration, and exports the holder list as CSV. It is read-only and free.
CSV upload
Supplying a recipient list as comma-separated rows of address and amount instead of typing them into a form. Long lists are worth checking twice before signing: a malformed row is caught by the batch reverting, which costs only gas, but a valid row for the wrong address cannot be undone.
Holder concentration
How much of a token sits in a handful of wallets — the percentage held by the top 10 addresses is the usual summary. High concentration means a few sellers can move the price, and it is one of the first signals the Token Checker and every snapshot report.
Safety
4 termsNon-custodial
The property that nobody but you can move your assets. Arctools has no account balances, no withdrawal queue and no key material: tokens are deployed to your wallet, LP tokens are minted to you, and each tool finishes and settles inside the transaction you sign.
Rug pull
A token whose creators take the value back out — typically by withdrawing the pool, minting into the float and dumping, or changing a tax to 100% before anyone can sell. The defences are verifiable ones: renounced ownership, a fixed supply, and liquidity that is locked or burned rather than promised.
Honeypot
A token that can be bought but not sold: a transfer restriction, a blocklist or a sell tax so high that a sale returns nothing. Because a honeypot only bites on the way out, checking that the sell path works — and reading the tax and blocklist settings first — is the only way to avoid one.
ERC-20 allowance
The permission you give a contract to move a token from your wallet, set with approve(). It is scoped to one spender and one amount, and it outlives the transaction that requested it unless something revokes it — which is why the Arctools contracts deliberately reset every allowance they take back to zero before returning.
Definitions follow Arc's published behaviour at docs.arc.io. Where a definition here differs from the documentation, the documentation wins.
Arc-specific terms worth reading twice
Eight definitions above are the ones that bite people porting habits from other chains. Each has a short explanation, and most link onward to the parameter that governs it. Search for any of them by name:
- Native USDC (18 decimals)
- ERC-20 USDC (6 decimals)
- The 20 Gwei fee floor
- Deterministic finality
- EIP-7708 Transfer logs
- The Osaka baseline
- PREVRANDAO returning 0
- Blob transactions
If something in the tools uses a word that is not defined here, that is a gap worth closing — email us and the definition gets written.
Terms are cheap; the tools are where they get used
Everything defined here shows up in a form somewhere on this site. Start with the free Token Checker, or go straight to a launch and pay the flat 50 USDC only when you sign.