Top 5 RPC Providers for Arc in 2026

Arc is the EVM-compatible layer 1 built by Circle, the issuer of USDC, purpose-designed for stablecoin-native finance—payments, FX, treasury operations, tokenized assets, and capital-market settlement. It ran as a public testnet from October 2025, with institutional participants including BlackRock, Visa, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and Mastercard testing integrations ahead of launch. Mainnet opened September 16, 2026, with eleven founding validators—BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, and Visa, alongside Circle.

The teams building here are banks, payment networks, and licensed fintechs—not weekend hackers. Choosing a reliable RPC provider is not optional. An endpoint that rate-limits during a settlement window, lacks tracing capabilities for audit trails, or carries no SOC 2 attestation is not an inconvenience—it is a blocker that can stop settlements, break compliance, and put the licensed entity on regulatory review. Cheap or unproven infrastructure at this scale costs more than it saves.

Quick comparison

1. Chainstack

Chainstack supports Arc on both the mainnet and testnet. Testnet support began in July 2026 and 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 is currently the only provider in this comparison offering three deployment models on Arc from a single control plane:

• Global Nodes — geo-balanced, auto-scaling RPC endpoints across 12 data centers, backed by a 99.99% uptime SLA. Suited to wallets, payment apps, and consumer-facing fintech products.
  
• Dedicated Nodes — isolated, high-performance instances with unlimited requests and full configuration control, built for trading desks, FX and treasury systems, and high-throughput indexers.
  
• Chainstack Self-Hosted — run Arc nodes inside the customer's own cloud, on-premises environment, or bare metal, with Chainstack handling deployment, monitoring, updates, and recovery. Chainstack is among the first providers to offer this on Arc—critical for banks and licensed institutions that cannot place customer-linked transaction data on shared infrastructure regardless of certifications.

Pricing is request-unit based and transparent: a free Developer tier includes 3M RU/month at 25 RPS; the Growth plan is $49/month for 20M RU at 250 RPS. Chainstack serves 100,000+ developers across 70+ chains and holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and the platform 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: Chainstack is a general-purpose multi-chain provider, not an Arc-native specialist, so it does not ship prebuilt stablecoin-payment indexing APIs the way an Arc-specific tool might.

2. Blockdaemon

Blockdaemon is one of Arc's official infrastructure partners, describing its offering as institutional-grade node access with secure, compliant infrastructure—positioned explicitly at banks, custodians, and funds accessing tokenized and stablecoin-denominated assets. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 back a strongly institutional compliance posture.

Where it falls short: The free tier is capped at just 5 RPS, which limits it to early testing rather than real evaluation traffic—and paid-tier pricing isn't published; Starter and Growth plans still require contacting sales, which raises the evaluation barrier for teams that want to see numbers upfront.

3. dRPC

dRPC is one of Arc's official infrastructure partners, offering access two ways: NodeCloud, a hosted multichain platform that aggregates upstream node operators with load-balanced routing and pay-as-you-go pricing; and NodeCore, a free open-source RPC load balancer that teams self-host to route across multiple providers. The per-request pricing model is one of the most transparent in this comparison.

Where it falls short: dRPC operates as an aggregator across third-party operators rather than running its own dedicated single-tenant infrastructure, which can be a fit issue for workloads that need contention-free, contract-guaranteed capacity. It does not publish SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 attestations—typically disqualifying for regulated banking and payments workloads. Public and free tiers carry no SLA.

4. Alchemy

Alchemy is one of Arc's officially announced infrastructure partners (since February 2026) and supports Arc with its full platform: enhanced APIs, monitoring, and debugging tools. Pricing is compute-unit based with a 30M CU/month free tier. Alchemy holds SOC 2 Type II and offers full tracing capabilities.

Where it falls short: Alchemy's isolated infrastructure is only available through Dedicated Clusters, an enterprise-tier offering accessed via sales rather than a self-serve dashboard—so smaller teams on Arc cannot spin up a single-tenant node from a standard paid plan. Chain-specific Dedicated Clusters availability for Arc is not documented in Alchemy's public materials. The CU model is method-weighted, making cost forecasting harder for trace-heavy workloads, and Alchemy does not publish ISO 27001.

5. Quicknode

Quicknode is listed among Arc's official infrastructure partners, offering managed endpoints with tracing and debugging capabilities, globally distributed nodes, and dedicated clusters for isolated capacity. Quicknode carries dual SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 attestations.

Where it falls short: Quicknode's free access is trial-based rather than perpetual, which makes long-running low-volume workloads awkward to host past the initial period. Pricing is credit-based and method-weighted, so a trace-heavy audit workload burns credits far faster than simple reads.

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.