What is a stablechain?

Most stablecoin volume still moves on general-purpose chains like Ethereum, Tron, Solana and Base. Stablechains are built for moving stablecoins, with the extras payment businesses ask for, such as privacy options and compliance tooling.

Plasma, built around USDT, went live in beta on September 25, 2025, and Stable followed in December with USDT0 as its gas token. Tempo, from Stripe and Paradigm, opened mainnet on March 18, 2026. Circle's Arc is the largest so far: live since September 16, 2026, with USDC as gas and a permissioned validator set that includes BlackRock, Visa and Mastercard.

The catch is control. These chains usually run on a small validator set picked by the issuer and its partners, which puts them closer to a shared bank ledger than to Ethereum. They also start with thin liquidity and few apps, while USDT on Tron already does the job for a lot of people. No one knows yet whether issuers can pull payments off the chains people already use.

Say a merchant receives 500 USDC on a stablechain and pays a fee of a fraction of a cent, also in USDC. The merchant never holds a second token. On Ethereum the same payment needs ETH in the wallet first.

Also called: stablecoin chain, payments chain.

Arc is one of the 15 networks in Cashboard's registry. A Chain status widget can track its block height, block age, fee and RPC latency, and an Arc address can go into a watch-only portfolio. Arc has no trending pools feed yet. In Stablecoin risk, each coin's row names the chains holding the bulk of its supply, and Market flows tracks the total.

• Chain status
• Stablecoin risk
• Market flows

• Stablecoin
• Layer 2
• Finality
• Stablecoin supply