Arc mainnet is live: what a dedicated Arc node looks like on day one

Arc’s public mainnet went live today, 16 September 2026, after a private mainnet phase with more than 100 builders and a public testnet that has run since 28 October 2025. Our Arc page moved from testnet to mainnet the same day, and dedicated Arc nodes are configurable now.

What Arc is

Arc is a Layer-1 built by Circle for stablecoin-native finance. Three things set it apart from the EVM chains most operators already run:

• USDC is the gas token. Fees are dollar-denominated, with EURC and USYC natively supported alongside. There is no volatile native token to hold for gas.
• Deterministic, sub-second finality. Consensus is Malachite BFT, a Tendermint-family engine, so a block is final when it is committed. On testnet we measured roughly 0.48 s blocks; Circle has not published a mainnet figure yet.
• A permissioned validator set. The founding cohort is BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa and Worldpay. Anyone can run a full node, which verifies every block but does not vote.

Execution is a Reth-based client, so Solidity contracts, Ethereum JSON-RPC and the usual tooling work unchanged. Mainnet is chain ID 5042; the testnet stays on 5042002.

What you can run

• Full node, from $199/mo. Current state, live queries, transaction broadcast, every RPC method on, WebSocket on port 8546 alongside JSON-RPC on 8545, plus Arc’s own arc namespace (arc_getCertificate, arc_getVersion).
• Archive node, from $799/mo. Full history for indexing, analytics and trace queries.
• Validator: not offered. The set is permissioned, so there is no validator to sell. We say so on the page rather than listing “on request”.

Public-facing nodes should run with --public-api, which hides pending-transaction RPCs and warns on namespaces beyond eth, net, web3 and rpc. We set that up for you.

The hardware Arc asks for

Arc’s node requirements list Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+ or Debian 12+), a CPU chosen for clock speed over core count, 64 GB+ memory, a 1 TB+ NVMe SSD (TLC recommended) and stable 24 Mbps+ bandwidth. Nodes bootstrap from official snapshots only; syncing from genesis is not supported. The published snapshot sizes are still the testnet ones, about 68 GB for the execution layer and 16 GB for the consensus layer compressed. Mainnet snapshot sizes are not published yet, which is why our quote confirms disk before you pay rather than guessing.

The operator notes that matter this week

• arc-node v0.8.0 (28 August 2026) is mandatory. Zero7 and Zero8 activated on mainnet at 2026-09-10 15:00 UTC. The release moves to reth 2.2 with Storage V2 snapshots, disables the admin RPC routes by default (--rpc.admin to enable), and makes arc-snapshots download take explicit --chain and --el-profile flags.
• The separate-host EL/CL RPC transport is deprecated and goes away in v0.9.0. New nodes should run execution and consensus on one machine over IPC, which is how we build them.
• v0.7.2 (4 June 2026) lowered the default JSON-RPC gas cap to 30M, capped batch requests at 100 entries and rejects pre-EIP-155 transactions over RPC by default. Clients that batch heavily need to know.

Ordering one

The Arc page has the pricing cards, the configurator and the full spec sheet with every source linked. Pick full or archive, a tuning profile and a region; the firm quote for that exact configuration arrives within the hour, and the node goes live once it is synced from the official snapshot.

Sources: Circle’s mainnet press release (16 September 2026), docs.arc.io (connect-to-arc, rpc-endpoints, node-requirements, running-a-node) and the circlefin/arc-node changelog.