Locking tokens on Arc

Arc is Circle's chain, id 5042, and it uses USDC as its gas token rather than a coin of its own. That changes a few practical things about locking there.

Gas is USDC

You pay for transactions in USDC, so there is no separate gas token to acquire before you can lock anything. Lockbox fees are priced in dollars on both chains, but Arc is the simpler of the two: on Robinhood Chain the fee is charged in USDG, which you have to hold and approve, while here it is the currency you are already paying gas in, so it rides along with the transaction and needs no approval at all.

The decimals trap

Arc carries two denominations of the same balance at once, and it catches people out. The native balance behaves like ether and reports 18 decimals, while the ERC-20 interface over that same balance reports USDC's usual 6. Both describe the same money. If you are building against Arc, read decimals from the token contract rather than assuming, and be careful which of the two you are looking at.

What runs on Arc

• Locks and vesting, with the same cliff and schedule options as Robinhood Chain.
• Batch vesting from a CSV, up to 25 recipients per transaction.
• Transferable vaults, priced at 50 USDC.
• Multisend, for paying many wallets in one transaction.
• Burning, which is free and needs no contract.

There is no $BOX on Arc and no plan for a second one. Fees collected on Arc are bridged to Robinhood Chain and buy the same $BOX there.

Fewer eyes, so check more

Arc is newer and quieter than Robinhood Chain. There is less tooling, fewer explorers and, as far as we know, no other token locker running there at all. That is the reason Lockbox supports it, but it cuts both ways: with fewer people looking, check things yourself rather than assuming someone else already has.

Every Lockbox contract on Arc has its source verified on the Arc explorer. Every lock on Arc is listed here, alongside Robinhood Chain.