How Arcade works.
Everything below is what happens when you use the product and what it costs. Every number is taken from the contracts, and where a charge does not reach Arcade, this page says who does receive it.
Getting started
- 01Bring dollars to Arc
Arc uses USDC as its gas token, so one asset covers both trading and fees. Move USDC over from Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche or Polygon on the bridge. It arrives as native USDC — not a wrapped claim on something held elsewhere.
- 02Connect a wallet
Any injected EVM wallet. Arcade never takes custody, never asks for a seed phrase, and cannot move your funds. Approvals are requested for the exact amount of a single action rather than as an unlimited allowance.
- 03
What happens during a launch
A launch runs through four phases. The creator picks the timings once, at deploy, and they are written into the contract constructor — nobody can change them afterwards, including us.
Deposit USDC. No price quoted, no allocation assigned. Everyone clears at one uniform price.
The curve opens with a premium on the first buys, decaying to zero. Per-wallet caps and a sell tax are active.
No premium, no caps, no tax. A plain bonding curve denominated in dollars.
Liquidity deploys to Uniswap on Arc and the LP tokens are burned.
During the commit phase nothing is quoted and nothing is allocated, so landing in the first block and the last block produce identical outcomes. When the curve opens, the earliest buyers pay the largest premium. There is no moment where speed is rewarded, which is why Arcade does not need to detect bots.
Fees
Three charges exist during a launch, and two of them never reach Arcade — they are routed into the token's own liquidity reserve, which becomes its Uniswap position at graduation. That distinction is the point of the mechanism, so it is stated in the table rather than buried.
A flat anti-sybil charge, not a percentage — it is negligible for a real buyer and expensive for someone funding five hundred wallets. It is taken from the first commit only; topping up the same wallet costs nothing extra. It is not refunded if your commit is scaled back at clearing.
The first buyer on the curve pays the largest premium; it decays linearly to nothing by the end of the guard. This is the mechanism that makes racing pointless — and every cent of it goes into the token's own liquidity reserve, not to Arcade and not to the creator. Winning the race means donating to the pool you are about to trade against.
Targets the flip specifically: a sniper who buys in the first block and dumps two minutes later pays close to the maximum premium going in and close to the maximum tax coming out. After the guard window ends it is zero, permanently. Like the premium, it accrues to the liquidity reserve rather than to us.
The only charge Arcade itself collects on a launch, and it is taken once, at graduation, from the raised amount — not per trade. Choosing $ARCADE as the quote asset drops it to 0.3%.
Everything else you pay
Caps how much any single wallet can hold during the guard window, lifting to unlimited by the end of it. Not a charge — a ceiling.
Paid to Arc validators, never to Arcade. Because USDC is Arc's native gas token, gas is denominated in dollars rather than a volatile asset you have to hold separately.
Arcade adds nothing on top of bridging. A standard transfer costs nothing beyond gas; a fast transfer pays Circle a per-route fee that is quoted live before you sign.
There is no trading fee on the curve, no fee to deploy a token, no fee to bridge, no fee to claim a commit, and no subscription. The launched token itself is a plain ERC-20 with no transfer hook and no owner — the sell tax lives in the curve contract and expires, so it can never follow the token onto an exchange.
Choosing a quote asset
A launch can be priced against USDC or against $ARCADE. Buyers pay in USDC either way; the choice decides what the token is paired with at graduation and what the creator pays.
| Quote asset | Platform fee | Points | Graduation pool |
|---|---|---|---|
| USDC | 1.0% | ×1 | TOKEN / USDC |
| $ARCADE | 0.3% | ×3 | TOKEN / ARCADE |
Creator proceeds settle in the quote asset, not in the launched token. Being paid in the coin you just created means your payout falls as the price falls, exactly when you are most likely to need it — so Arcade does not do that.
Graduation
When a launch reaches its target — set by the creator between $25,000 and $500,000 — the curve closes and the accumulated liquidity reserve is paired with the remaining supply on Uniswap. The LP tokens are then burned.
Burned, not locked and not timelocked and not held by a multisig. There is no admin key that can retrieve that liquidity, because no such key exists. This is also why the premium and the sell tax matter to you as a buyer even though you pay them: they are the reserve, and the reserve is the floor of the pool you will be trading into.
Bridging
The bridge runs on Circle's CCTP. Your USDC is burned on the source chain and an equal amount is minted natively on Arc. There is no pool holding your deposit, no wrapped asset, and no Arcade contract anywhere in the path — we cannot pause, seize or reroute a transfer.
You sign twice, because a burn on one chain and a mint on another are two transactions. Between them, Circle attests the burn. The second signature can be sent at any time afterwards and does not expire; if you close the tab mid-transfer, reopen the bridge with the same wallet and it resumes.
Standard transfers wait for full finality and cost nothing beyond gas. Fast transfers pay Circle a per-route fee, quoted live before you sign. Arcade adds nothing to either.
The Fair Start Report
Every launch carries a score from 0 to 100 with its inputs shown: how much supply the deployer's funding cluster holds, how much was acquired in the first minute, top-10 concentration, whether the commit phase was used, and the creator's lock schedule.
The score never renders without those inputs, and a bad score is displayed as prominently as a good one. A launch that skipped the commit phase says so on its card, in those words. Arcade does not delist tokens for scoring badly — it labels them.
A high score means the launch mechanism was not obviously extractive. It is not a prediction, an endorsement, or a safety rating. Tokens launched here can and do go to zero, and a perfectly fair start does not make a token a good buy.
Common questions
- Do I need to hold $ARCADE to use Arcade?
- No. Buyers pay in USDC on every launch. $ARCADE only changes what a creator pays and what the token is paired with at graduation.
- Can the creator change the rules after launching?
- No. Every parameter is set in the constructor at deploy and is immutable. The token page shows them exactly as they were set.
- Can Arcade rug a launch?
- Arcade holds no keys over individual launches and takes no custody of funds. Liquidity is burned at graduation. What Arcade can do is change fees and defaults for future launches — never for one already deployed.
- Why is there a $0.25 charge to commit?
- It makes sybil attacks expensive without penalising real buyers. Funding five hundred wallets costs five hundred wallets' worth of USDC plus the entry fee on each; committing once yourself costs a quarter.
- I sold and received less than I expected.
- Selling back into the curve during the guard window carries a tax that starts at 30% and decays to zero by the end of the window. It is displayed on the trade panel before you confirm, and it goes to the token's liquidity reserve rather than to Arcade.
- My commit was only partly filled.
- The commit phase clears at a single uniform price. If it is oversubscribed, every wallet is scaled back by the same proportion and the remainder is refunded — there is no queue and no priority.
Arcade makes the launch mechanism non-extractive and the remaining risk visible. It does not make any token safe. Nothing on this page is financial advice, and tokens launched here can lose all of their value.