Buying & selling

An Arc Perp coin is an ordinary ERC-20 in an ordinary Uniswap V3 pool on Arc. Anything that can swap can trade it — the coin page, a Telegram bot, an aggregator, your wallet.

One pool, one hop

Before the bond the pair is COIN / USDC. After it, COIN / TRACKER. Either way it is a single pool at the 1% fee tier, reachable through Uniswap's standard router in one hop from its quote. No custom contract, no allow-list, no special path.

That is why a bot that has never heard of Arc Perp trades a coin correctly on its first try. We kept that property on purpose, and it is why coins live on Uniswap V3 rather than somewhere with fancier fees that bots cannot read.

No tax, ever

The token takes nothing on transfer. Zero on buys, zero on sells, in every block including the first.

A transfer tax would make swaps through the standard router fail, get the coin flagged red by scanners, and quietly turn every holder into someone paying to leave. Here the only fee is the pool's, and it is in the quote before you sign.

Paying: USDC only

You buy with USDC and you sell into USDC. There is no path through any other coin, and none is needed: on Arc, USDC is also what gas is paid in, so the same balance covers the trade and its fee. Your wallet may show that balance twice — once as the network's native balance with 18 decimals, once as the USDC token with 6 — but it is the same money, not two amounts. Keep a few cents of it free for gas.

A first purchase takes a USDC approval, then the swap; wallets that can batch do both in one confirmation. Arc finalises a block in under a second, so a confirmed trade is done.

What a trade costs

Before the bond, buy and immediately sell, and you pay the pool's 1% fee twice, plus whatever your own size did to the price. That is the whole list. Roughly:

round-trip cost  ≈  2 × 1%  +  2 × (your ticket ÷ pool depth)

After the bond, a buy paid in USDC goes USDC → tracker → coin: the app mints the tracker at its NAV straight from the vault (no pool, no slippage on that leg; the mint and redeem fees are 0 by default), then swaps it for the coin. A sell is the mirror image: coin → tracker on the pool, then a redemption at NAV. A round trip is then about 2 × 1%, plus impact.

The impact term is not a charge. It is the price move you caused, and it goes back to the next trader. There is no hidden spread, no tax, no gap between the quoted price and the filled one beyond the slippage limit you set.

Where the fee goes

Every swap on a coin's pool pays 1%. 0.7% goes to the coin's creator, 0.3% to the protocol. The split is a constant in the locker contract and the destinations are fixed; whoever sweeps the fees, the money goes to the same two places. See Claiming your fees.

Depth and slippage

Before the bond, a fresh coin has very little behind it, so early buys move the price a lot — that is what a fresh launch is. The coin page shows the accumulated backing so you can see exactly how much is there before you size a trade.

After the bond, the coin is paired to a tracker whose own market is kept deep around its value, so quoted depth improves markedly the moment the coin migrates.

Reading the price after the bond

Once a coin is bonded, it is quoted in its tracker rather than in dollars. The tracker's value follows the stock at its multiple, so the coin's dollar price can move with no swap at all — up when the stock goes the coin's way, down when it does not. A calm chart on a quiet day can still hide a stock moving against you. See NAV, decay & funding.

Selling after the bond

A bonded coin is quoted in its tracker, so a sell from the coin page takes two transactions: swap the coin for the tracker in the coin's pool, then redeem the tracker for USDC at NAV on its vault. The quote covers both legs, and the minimum you accept applies to the USDC you finally receive.

The vault pays a redeem on the spot only out of the USDC it holds idle, and it holds very little: whatever it can spare is on edgeX, backing the hedge. When it cannot pay your size at once — the coin page checks before you sign and says so — the second transaction puts your redeem in the vault's queue instead. The swap is done at that point and your tracker tokens wait in the vault. The keeper recalls USDC from edgeX (a withdrawal lands about a minute after it is sent, so count on a few minutes in all, longer when the venue is slow) and the vault pays the queue in order, at the NAV of that moment.

That NAV is not the one you were quoted: the stock keeps moving while you wait. Your minimum still holds. If the NAV would pay less than the minimum you accepted, the request is skipped rather than filled below it. The Portfolio page lists your open requests with their status; cancel a skipped one there to get your tracker tokens back. A pending one can be cancelled the same way until it is paid.

One thing specific to USDC

Circle's USDC has a blocklist. An address on it can neither send nor receive USDC, so it cannot buy, sell or claim fees in USDC here either. That is a property of the dollar this chain runs on, not a rule of ours, and no contract of ours can lift it.