How to Launch a Token on Arc Mainnet

Arc Mainnet is Circle's stablecoin Layer 1, and its most useful property for a token launch is that USDC is the gas token. There is no separate native asset to buy, bridge and hold before you can deploy anything: the same USDC balance that funds your launch pays the gas for it. Arctools' Arc Token Launch turns the whole launch into one guided session — configure supply, taxes, limits and ownership, pay a flat 50 USDC, and sign one deployment transaction.

This guide walks through the decisions in the order the tool asks for them, explains which settings you can still change afterwards and which ones are permanent, and puts real numbers on what a launch costs.

Before you start

You need three things.

1. A wallet that can connect to Arc Mainnet. Arc Mainnet is chain id 5042 with the RPC endpoint https://rpc.mainnet.arc.io, and the explorer at https://explorer.arc.io. If the network is not already in your wallet, add it manually or follow Arc's connect guide.
2. USDC on Arc. The launch costs a flat 50 USDC, and gas is charged in USDC as well. Keep a few USDC of headroom on top of the fee so a failed signature never leaves you short. Gas on Arc is paid through the 18-decimal native interface of USDC; pool amounts later use the 6-decimal ERC-20 interface at 0x3600000000000000000000000000000000000000. They are the same balance seen two ways — see Arc's EVM differences if you want the full explanation.
3. Decisions made in advance. Write these down before you connect a wallet: total supply, mint policy, buy/sell taxes and their recipients, burn-on-transfer percentage, max transaction and max wallet percentages, and whether you plan to revoke ownership.

You do not need any code, an audit, or a separate gas token. You do need to know what you want the token to do.

1. Connect your wallet and check your USDC balance

Connect the wallet you want to own the contract. Check the balance shown in the tool against what your wallet reports: if the two disagree, you are probably on the wrong network.

Verify two things before you spend anything: that the wallet is on chain 5042 and not on Arc Testnet (id 5042002), and that you hold enough USDC for the fee, the gas and any liquidity you plan to add straight afterwards.

A note on gas that saves people an hour: on Arc, maxFeePerGas must be at least 20 Gwei. Transactions priced below that floor are dropped by the mempool with no error and no receipt. Wallets that estimate aggressively can produce exactly that failure, which is why Arctools sets the fee floor for you on every write.

2. Decide the supply, decimals and mint policy

Total supply is an accounting choice, not a valuation. A token with 1,000,000,000 units and a token with 100,000 units can have exactly the same market capitalisation — what sets value is how much USDC sits in the pool against how much of the supply is in it, which is covered in how to create a liquidity pool on Arc.

Practical guidance:

• 18 decimals is the ERC-20 default and what most tooling expects. Use 6 only if you are deliberately mimicking USDC and your integrations are prepared for it.
• A round supply (100 million, 1 billion) keeps the percentage conversations simple, since limits, taxes and allocations are all expressed as percentages of supply.
• Fixed versus mintable matters more than the number. A fixed supply can never be diluted; a mintable token keeps that option open, which is convenient for treasury work and a permanent overhang for buyers.

3. Configure taxes, burn and deflation

Taxes are the settings most likely to break a launch, so configure them deliberately rather than maximally.

• Buy tax is charged when someone swaps USDC into your token. Sell tax is charged on the way out. Transfer tax hits ordinary wallet-to-wallet sends, and the most credible configuration leaves it at zero — a token that taxes simple transfers is difficult to use in the rest of DeFi.
• Tax recipients split the proceeds. Sending a share to marketing, development, liquidity and burn wallets is normal; sending 100% to one wallet you control is the configuration buyers recognise as extraction. Choose rates you are willing to defend in public.
• Burn on transfer destroys a percentage of each taxed movement, which reduces supply over time. It is a real deflationary mechanic, and it also makes the exact amount every recipient receives slightly unpredictable.
• Deflation settings compound: a sell tax plus burn-on-transfer plus a burn share of tax can leave a seller receiving materially less than the quoted price. Model the total, not each piece.

Two hard rules. The Uniswap pair must be exempt from tax, or the router's own transfers pay tax and small trades start failing. And the tax ceilings you commit to at launch are the ceilings the Arc Token Manager can later move within — they are the difference between "adjustable" and "unbounded".

4. Set the transaction and wallet limits

Max transaction and max wallet limits are usually described as anti-whale protection. On launch day they do something more important: they stop a bot from buying a large share of the pool in the first seconds.

Set them as percentages of supply, and check them against your liquidity plan. If the pool will hold 60% of supply and your max wallet is 2%, no wallet — including the pair — can hold the pool's own tokens, and trades revert. Exempt the pair, then set a limit that leaves room for the pool plus a reasonable holder position.

Limits are not permanent: you can raise or remove them through the token manager while you still hold the owner role. Leaving a very low max transaction in place for months caps how much anyone can ever buy.

5. Choose the trading start and anti-sniper delay

The trading start is the moment transfers become possible; until it passes, transfers revert, including your first buyers' purchases. If you launch the token and create the pool in separate sessions, open trading when the pool exists, not before.

The anti-sniper delay holds trading for a set number of blocks after it opens, so a bot cannot be first in. Arc blocks finalise in well under a second, so a delay measured in blocks is short in wall-clock time: a speed bump, not a shield. The stronger protection is a bundle launch, where the pool creation and the first buys happen inside a single atomic transaction and there is no window to front-run at all.

6. Decide the ownership policy

Keeping the owner role means keeping the ability to change taxes, limits and exemptions, to mint if the token is mintable, and to pause trading — all of which is legitimate during launch week.

Plan the sequence in this order: configure every setting, create the pool, exempt the pair, verify that trading works, then decide about ownership. Renouncing is irreversible — once the owner is the zero address, no tax change, no mint, no new exemption, ever. That is exactly why buyers trust it. Make your Arc token safe covers the full order of operations and the checks the Arc Token Checker runs.

7. Review, pay the fee and deploy

The review screen is the last chance to catch a decimal-place mistake. Read the supply and each tax rate back against your notes, confirm the recipient addresses, and check the limit percentages once more.

Then sign: the flat 50 USDC service fee first, the deployment second. Both settle in under a second, and because Arc finality is deterministic, one confirmation is final — there is nothing to wait for afterwards. Copy the token address from the success screen, save the transaction hash, and paste both into your project notes and community channels.

If a transaction is rejected, check the fee first: a below-floor maxFeePerGas produces a drop rather than an error. Arc's gas and fees reference covers the floor and how fees are denominated.

What it costs

Item	Amount	Notes
Arctools service fee	50 USDC flat	One payment per launch, in USDC
Arc gas for the deployment	Fractions of a cent to a few cents	See the arithmetic below
Token supply	0 USDC	You are minting supply, not buying it
Liquidity	Your capital, plus a separate 50 USDC	Not included in the launch

Gas arithmetic you can check yourself. Arc's fee floor is 20 Gwei, which is 0.00000002 USDC per unit of gas. That means 100,000 gas costs 0.002 USDC and a full million gas costs 0.02 USDC. A token deployment that consumes a few million gas therefore costs a handful of cents. Your exact figure depends on the contract and the settings you chose; your wallet shows the estimate before you sign, and the explorer shows the actual charge afterwards.

The honest total for launch day: 50 USDC for the launch, plus 50 USDC if you create and seed a pool with the Liquidity Pool Creator, the pool capital you deposit, and cents of gas. Snapshots and the token checker are free; a multisender distribution adds 50 USDC. See the pricing page.

Common mistakes

• Underpricing gas. Below 20 Gwei, Arc drops the transaction silently. If nothing appears on the explorer, raise the fee and resubmit.

• Taxing the pair. The Uniswap pair must be exempt, or trades break in ways that look like a bug in the token.

• Limits tighter than the pool. If the max wallet is smaller than the pool's share, the pool cannot hold its own tokens.

• Renouncing before configuring. Add the pool exemption and settle the tax rates first; a renounce cannot be undone.

• Pairing USDC with USDC. Native USDC and ERC-20 USDC are the same balance. A pool pairing them is meaningless — always use the ERC-20 interface at 0x3600…0000 for pool math.

• Forgetting disclosure. If you tax, bundle or reserve supply, say so. Everything is visible on the explorer; being told about it first is what separates a launch from a rug.

Where to go next

A deployed token with no pool cannot be traded, so the next step is creating a liquidity pool on Arc and deciding the opening valuation your depth implies. If you would rather have the price set for you, with liquidity and coordinated buys in one atomic transaction, read bundle launch a token on Arc. And once the pool is live, lock the liquidity so buyers can verify that the floor will not be pulled.