Top 5 RPC providers for Arc in 2026

Arc is the EVM-compatible layer 1 built by Circle, the issuer of USDC, purpose-built for stablecoin-native finance — payments, FX, treasury, and capital-markets settlement. It ran as a public testnet from October 2025 with institutional participants including BlackRock and Visa. Mainnet opened September 16, 2026 with eleven founding validators — including BlackRock, DTCC, Mastercard, Standard Chartered, and Visa — alongside Circle.

The teams building here are banks, payment networks, and licensed fintechs. An endpoint that rate-limits during a settlement window, lacks tracing for audit trails, or carries no SOC 2 attestation can stop a settlement or put a license on review — this is stablecoin infrastructure, held to a higher bar than general-purpose RPC. This comparison reflects each provider’s testnet offering; confirm mainnet availability directly, since Circle only published mainnet details at launch.

Quick comparison

1. Chainstack

Chainstack supports Arc on both mainnet and testnet — testnet support began in July 2026, extended to mainnet at launch — with full debugging and tracing tools and out-of-the-box compatibility with ethers.js, viem, and web3.py. It’s the only provider here offering three deployment models from a single control plane:

• Global Nodes — auto-scaling, 99.99% uptime, best for wallets and USDC payment apps
• Dedicated Nodes — isolated, unlimited requests, built for FX desks and treasury teams moving stablecoin volume
• Chainstack Self-Hosted — runs inside the customer’s own cloud or bare metal, for banks and settlement teams that can’t let transaction data leave their environment

Pricing is request-unit based: a free Developer tier includes 3M RU/month; the Growth plan is $49/month for 20M RU. Chainstack serves 100,000+ developers across 70+ chains and holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. The platform also ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets developers query Arc data and deploy nodes from Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, ChatGPT, Codex, and Gemini.

Where it falls short: not Arc-native, no prebuilt stablecoin-payment indexing APIs.

2. Blockdaemon

Blockdaemon supports Arc, positioned at banks, custodians, and funds accessing tokenized and stablecoin assets, with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 backing its compliance posture. It’s one of the older institutional infrastructure providers, built around node operation, staking, and custody services for banks. A self-serve free tier (3M compute units/month, 5 RPS) and published Starter/Growth plans are available; only the top Enterprise tier requires a sales conversation.

Where it falls short: it’s built around general institutional infrastructure rather than dedicated Arc tooling, and there’s no self-hosted deployment option.

3. Uniblock

Uniblock supports Arc with full coverage through its unified API — one endpoint across 300+ blockchains via 55 data partners, with patented auto-routing for provider selection and failover. It’s a well-funded aggregator with real production traffic, including customers like Plume Network and Apechain, and usage-based pricing with no minimums.

Where it falls short: built as a multichain aggregation layer, not dedicated Arc infrastructure, so there’s no dedicated-node or self-hosted option, and it doesn’t publish SOC 2 or ISO 27001 — a blocker for regulated banking and payments workloads.

4. Alchemy

Alchemy supports Arc with enhanced APIs, monitoring, and debugging tools, plus a 30M CU/month free tier and SOC 2 Type II. It’s one of the largest general-purpose Web3 platforms, best known for enhanced APIs on top of standard RPC.

Where it falls short: isolated infrastructure is enterprise-only (Dedicated Clusters, sales-access), the compute-unit model is method-weighted, and Alchemy doesn’t publish ISO 27001.

5. Quicknode

Quicknode supports Arc, offering managed endpoints, tracing, globally distributed nodes, and dedicated clusters — with dual SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 attestations. It’s one of the longest-running multichain RPC providers, known for broad chain coverage (80+ chains) and add-ons like Streams and Webhooks.

Where it falls short: free access is trial-based, not perpetual, and credit-based pricing is method-weighted, so audit-heavy workloads burn credits fast.

Final thoughts

Now that Arc mainnet is live, the deciding factor is compliance-grade infrastructure: archive and trace access paired with a current SOC 2 attestation — what separates a provider you can put behind a regulated payments product from one you can’t.

What’s the best RPC provider for Arc? For most teams, Chainstack is the strongest fit — the only provider here with dedicated, self-hosted, and managed deployment plus dual SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification. Teams with a niche need or an existing multichain account elsewhere may reasonably pick differently.

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