Dave Beach
Editorial & Communications Lead
Arc's mainnet goes live today, and syrupUSDC is live on it from the start.
Arc is an open, EVM-compatible Layer 1 built for financial markets. Arc provides deterministic sub-second transaction finality, uses USDC for gas to support predictable transaction costs, and is operated at launch by a permissioned validator set that includes known institutions. It launches with local fiat stablecoins, tokenized assets, programmable Bitcoin, and live markets for lending, trading, FX and payments.
Who's building on Arc
Many companies building on Arc are Fintechs, neobanks, and payment companies that hold dollars for their customers and want those dollars to earn something while they sit there.
Most of them run into the same challenge. An earn product sounds simple until you start building one. You need to underwrite borrowers, verify who they are, manage collateral, call margin when markets move, and keep it all running when things don’t go to plan. You need to build a lending business, and building one takes time and experience. It's rarely what a company had in mind when it set out to build a banking app and can quickly become a distraction.
That part is what Maple already does. syrupUSDC is how you access it: a single asset that puts USDC to work in our institutional lending markets, with around $1B deployed across overcollateralized, onchain loans. That stays the same wherever syrupUSDC is available.
So for a team building on Arc, adding an earn product becomes an integration rather than a product build.
Why Arc
We've always built for institutions, and institutions are particular about the infrastructure they'll use. They want deterministic settlement finality, costs they can plan around, and a clear answer to who runs the network. Arc gives them all three, which makes it a place money can operate.
The second reason is what else is on the chain. Arc launches with payments, FX, trading and tokenized assets already live. A chain built for moving value quickly also needs somewhere for dollars to sit when they aren't moving, and that's where syrupUSDC fits. A lending market is worth more when there's activity around it.
What's live today
syrupUSDC is live on Arc now. Institutions and applications on Arc can integrate it directly, with the same underwriting and the same credit team behind every position.
It's the first thing we're shipping on Arc, and we plan to do more.
Arc is the first chain where the companies building on it look like the companies we already work with. Fintechs, payment businesses, teams holding dollar-denominated balances for real customers. Being live from day one means we're there when they start looking for an earn product.
- Martin de Rijke, Head of Growth, Maple
Dave Beach
Editorial & Communications Lead
Dave runs content and communications at Maple, drawing on a decade in fintech and finance. Dave started as a banking trade journalist and went on to build out the content and communication strategies at leading fintechs.
