Very disappointing to see Circle take this approach in their GTM plan.
You can clearly see a lot of their team fundamentally misunderstands meme culture, and I think they made a mistake abandoning their initial vision of Arc as a stablecoin chain.
Now it's stuck in this weird middle ground where nobody really knows whether it's supposed to be a meme chain or a corporate stablecoin chain. They really messed up their positioning with memes, and this is going to be very difficult to recover from.
I suspect some key decision maker internally just said, “look at robinhood, we should do the same,” without actually understanding why it works for them.
There's a good chance Arc gets shut down within a year. The launch landed in no man's land, and the market is already competitive enough as it is.
For a public company, it'll be hard to justify continuing to throw money at it if it doesn't start showing meaningful traction and a path to becoming a real business.
I expected a competent team like Circle to do a lot better. But let's see if they can recover from it.