Circle’s Arc mainnet has moved above $334 million in decentralized finance TVL shortly after its public launch, giving the new Layer 1 an immediate pool of measurable on-chain liquidity. DefiLlama currently tracks $334.32 million locked across Arc protocols, alongside roughly $656 million in stablecoin market capitalization and $73 million in 24-hour decentralized exchange volume.
According to Circle’s official mainnet announcement, Arc went live publicly on September 16 with more than 100 applications and over 100 institutional and ecosystem builders. The network uses USDC for transaction fees and was designed around payments, foreign exchange, lending, tokenized assets and agent-driven economic activity.
Lending Drives Most of Arc’s TVL
The early TVL figure is heavily concentrated rather than evenly distributed across Arc’s ecosystem. Morpho Blue currently accounts for about $227.25 million, while Aave V4 holds another $77.48 million and Uniswap approximately $28.14 million. Together, those three protocols represent almost all of the network’s present DeFi TVL.
Smaller deployments are beginning to appear behind those leading markets. Aerodrome Slipstream currently holds about $1.13 million, while DyorSwap, Synthra Finance, Circle Gateway, SushiSwap and several smaller applications contribute substantially lower amounts. DefiLlama now lists 15 protocol entries for Arc, meaning the earlier launch-day count of eight protocols has already become outdated as additional integrations are indexed.
That concentration makes the $334 million figure useful but incomplete as a measure of adoption. High TVL at launch demonstrates that meaningful capital has entered Arc, but it does not yet establish broad or durable activity across a large number of independent applications. Lending markets supplied through Morpho and Aave currently dominate the network’s liquidity profile.
Institutional Validators Anchor Arc’s Launch
Circle launched Arc with a permissioned validator cohort that includes BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa. Those institutions participate in securing the network, while application deployment remains open to builders, giving Arc an institutional validator structure distinct from fully permissionless Layer 1 networks.
Circle has also positioned tokenized assets and stablecoins as core components of the network. USYC, BlackRock’s BUIDL, private-credit funds and cirBTC are among the assets Circle says can support trading, lending and collateral markets on Arc, while Aave and Morpho provide much of the initial credit infrastructure.
The launch-day TVL therefore provides an early operational benchmark rather than proof of mature network adoption. The next meaningful test will be whether Arc can retain and diversify its $334 million liquidity base as more applications go live, particularly if activity expands beyond the small number of lending and trading protocols currently responsible for most of its locked value.