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 Provider Dedicated Nodes Self-Hosted Free Tier SOC 2 ISO 27001 Pricing Chainstack ✅ ✅ ✅ (3M RU/mo) ✅ ✅ Request units Blockdaemon ✅ ❌ ✅ (3M CU/mo) ✅ ✅ Compute units Uniblock ❌ (aggregator) ❌ ✅ (usage-based) ❌ ❌ Pay-as-you-go Alchemy Enterprise only ❌ ✅ (30M CU/mo) ...