Arc, Circle's new stablecoin-focused blockchain, went live on September 16, 2026, with eleven founding validators including BlackRock, Mastercard, and Visa, creating an immediate infrastructure challenge: traditional RPC providers built for general-purpose blockchains are not equipped to handle regulated financial settlement. The launch reveals a widening gap between Web3 infrastructure designed for decentralized apps and infrastructure built for banks, payment networks, and licensed financial firms that need compliance-grade guarantees.

Arc is an EVM-compatible layer 1 blockchain, meaning it can run the same smart contracts as Ethereum, but it was purpose-built by Circle, the issuer of USDC stablecoin, specifically for stablecoin-native finance including payments, foreign exchange, treasury management, and capital-markets settlement. The blockchain ran as a public testnet from October 2025 with institutional participants, but the mainnet launch marks the moment when infrastructure choices become regulatory and operational necessities rather than technical preferences.

Why Does RPC Provider Choice Matter for Stablecoin Infrastructure?

An RPC provider is a service that allows applications and wallets to communicate with a blockchain. For general-purpose blockchains like Ethereum or Solana, an RPC endpoint that goes down for a few minutes is an inconvenience. For Arc, an endpoint that rate-limits during a settlement window, lacks tracing for audit trails, or carries no SOC 2 attestation can stop a settlement transaction or put a financial license under regulatory review. This is the critical difference: stablecoin infrastructure is held to a higher bar than general-purpose RPC services.

The teams building on Arc are not crypto-native startups but established financial institutions. Banks, payment networks, and licensed fintechs require infrastructure that meets institutional compliance standards, including SOC 2 Type II certification (a security and availability audit), ISO 27001 certification (information security management), and full transaction tracing for audit trails. These are not optional features; they are prerequisites for regulated financial operations.

How to Evaluate RPC Providers for Compliance-Grade Stablecoin Infrastructure

• Deployment Flexibility: Look for providers offering multiple deployment models, such as managed global nodes for high-volume payment apps, dedicated isolated nodes for treasury teams moving large stablecoin volumes, and self-hosted options for banks and settlement teams that cannot allow transaction data to leave their own infrastructure.
• Compliance Certifications: Verify that the provider holds current SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 attestations, which are non-negotiable for regulated financial workloads and demonstrate that the provider has undergone independent security audits.
• Debugging and Tracing Tools: Ensure the provider offers full transaction tracing and debugging capabilities, which are essential for maintaining audit trails and meeting regulatory requirements for settlement operations.
• Pricing Transparency: Compare pricing models, such as request-unit based pricing versus compute-unit based pricing, and verify whether free tiers are perpetual or trial-based, as this affects long-term cost predictability.

Among the five leading RPC providers supporting Arc, Chainstack stands out as the only provider offering all three deployment models, managed global nodes, dedicated isolated nodes, and self-hosted options, from a single control plane. Chainstack also holds both SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications and offers full debugging and tracing tools with out-of-the-box compatibility with popular Web3 libraries including ethers.js, viem, and web3.py. The provider began supporting Arc on testnet in July 2026 and extended support to mainnet at launch, with pricing based on request units; a free Developer tier includes 3 million request units per month, and the Growth plan costs $49 per month for 20 million request units.

Blockdaemon, another institutional infrastructure provider, supports Arc and is positioned at banks, custodians, and funds accessing tokenized and stablecoin assets, with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 backing its compliance posture. However, Blockdaemon is built around general institutional infrastructure rather than dedicated Arc tooling and does not offer a self-hosted deployment option, which limits its appeal for banks and settlement teams that require complete data isolation.

Uniblock supports Arc through a unified API that covers over 300 blockchains via 55 data partners, with patented auto-routing for provider selection and failover. The service is well-funded with real production traffic, including customers like Plume Network and Apechain, and offers usage-based pricing with no minimums. However, Uniblock is built as a multichain aggregation layer rather than dedicated Arc infrastructure, so it does not offer dedicated-node or self-hosted options, and it does not publish SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certifications, which is a blocker for regulated banking and payments workloads.

Alchemy, one of the largest general-purpose Web3 platforms, supports Arc with enhanced APIs, monitoring, and debugging tools, plus a 30 million compute units per month free tier and SOC 2 Type II certification. However, isolated infrastructure is available only at the enterprise tier, which requires a sales conversation, and Alchemy does not publish ISO 27001 certification. Quicknode, one of the longest-running multichain RPC providers, supports Arc with managed endpoints, tracing, globally distributed nodes, and dedicated clusters, with dual SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 attestations. However, free access is trial-based rather than perpetual, and credit-based pricing is method-weighted, meaning audit-heavy workloads burn credits quickly.

The infrastructure divide revealed by Arc's launch reflects a broader shift in Web3: as blockchain technology moves from experimental decentralized applications toward regulated financial settlement, the infrastructure layer must evolve to match. Providers that built for speed and scale in the early Web3 era are now competing with providers that built for compliance and institutional trust from the start. For teams building on Arc, the deciding factor is no longer feature breadth but compliance-grade infrastructure, specifically archive and trace access paired with current SOC 2 attestation, which separates a provider you can put behind a regulated payments product from one you cannot.