Aave V4 on Arc: three addresses hold 85.4% of the USDC

As of September 24, 2026, three addresses without public labels hold 122.5 of the 143.4 million USDC in the Aave V4 Main Spoke on Arc—85.4%—and have not withdrawn a single USDC since depositing. Between 23:36 UTC on September 15 and 02:44 on the 16th—a span of three hours and eight minutes the night before Arc's public launch—these three accounts filled the initial 56 million add cap (the maximum the spoke, the market contract, can contribute to the hub, which custodies liquidity). When the cap was raised to 150 million on the afternoon of the 16th, two of them added another 66.5 million between that evening and the night of the 17th. A fourth address has since contributed 20 million. The other 1,008 addresses with deposits total 895,339 USDC, and 1,007 of those account for 539,877: a median of 0.50 USDC per account. Credit arrived suddenly in the early hours of the 24th: the Main Spoke's USDC draw cap of 51 million is 99.98% utilized, and at a 1.62% rate, this full credit line yields the Aave DAO $82,619 per year. The ARFC that approved the deployment (the governance step prior to activation) expects the DAO to receive a minimum of $2 million per year for five years, with the deficit covered by "certain Arc ecosystem participants." With the draw caps as of September 24 (the maximum each spoke can borrow from the hub), the market would need an average lending rate of 13.4% with all available credit in use to generate that figure on its own. This article reconstructs who deposited and when, cross-references it with the caps and the ARFC, and calculates how much the market can actually pay.

Who provided the 143.4 million USDC for the Aave V4 Main Spoke on Arc?

The Main Spoke (the general USDC market, as opposed to Forex, Treasury, and tokenization) of the Aave V4 hub on Arc had accumulated 143,395,353 USDC in addedShares (the shares the hub records for each spoke based on its contribution) at block 22,570,744, at 19:59:05 UTC on September 24, 2026. The Supply and Withdraw events from the spoke itself, summed address by address from its deployment block 18,791,520 (September 2, 14:32:47 UTC) to that same block, yield 143,395,354 net USDC: 1,739 deposits and 953 withdrawals from 1,012 distinct addresses. The events match the hub except for 1.22 USDC, which is due to share rounding.

Of these 1,012 addresses, five explain 99.6% of the total and three account for 85.4%. The first, 0xe7df…b12c, holds 73,000,000 USDC (50.9%); the second, 0xed20…09ad, 25,000,000 (17.4%); the third, 0xa466…97b0, 24,500,000 (17.1%). None have withdrawn anything: their positions are exactly as they were on September 17, and two of the three have not sent a single transaction since then. All three are external accounts (EOAs, not contracts) with little network activity (14, 4, and 38 transactions sent as of September 24) and operate without intermediaries: in all their events, caller and user match, meaning there is no position manager aggregating multiple users behind a single address. The Arc explorer (Blockscout) showed no labels for any of them on September 19; by the 24th, its API responds with an anti-bot verification, and the check cannot be repeated automatically. The first and third, 0xe7df…b12c and 0xa466…97b0, also hold 98.7% of the Main Spoke's EURC: 857,962 and 500,000 out of 1,376,165 EURC.

Of the 1,007 addresses outside the top 5, 663 hold less than 10 USDC, 96 reach 100, and 20 reach 1,000; the largest holds 250,000 USDC, and 22 have already withdrawn everything they deposited. Under the cap expanded on September 16, this distribution measures retail deposit demand on Arc: hundreds of dollars per account, with an average of 536 and a median of 0.50.

CryptoSlate wrote on September 17, with 76 million deposited, that public launch data did not reveal "if a few addresses contributed the bulk of the USDC"; AMBCrypto spoke on the 18th of "users." Circle's September 16 press release names Bitwise, Cumberland, Dialectic, Galaxy, Gauntlet, Keyrock, and Steakhouse Financial as supporters of Arc's on-chain credit, including "the supply of USDC and EURC," without providing figures or addresses. Spoke events show how many accounts and how much; they do not say who they belong to, and this article does not attribute them.

How did three addresses fill the 56 million USDC cap of Aave V4 on Arc in three hours?

The ARFC "Deploy Aave V4 on Arc," published by Aave Labs on June 19, 2026, and approved on Snapshot (the off-chain vote prior to execution) on September 6 with 415,813 votes in favor, none against, and no abstentions (100 voters), set an add cap of 56,000,000 USDC and a draw cap of 51,000,000 for the Main Spoke. The spoke was deployed on September 2 with the market halted, and the hub opened it on September 14 at 16:02:52 UTC, thirty-six hours before Arc's public launch; until the night of the 15th, it only received five test deposits ranging from 0.10 to 1 USDC, totaling 2.66 net USDC.

Two of the three accounts followed the same pattern before moving the large sums: a 100 USDC deposit, a withdrawal of those 100 USDC three to four minutes later, and then, after another four to twelve minutes, the full amount. The third deposit, of 6,499,997.34 USDC, fills the cap to the cent: 56,000,000.00 counting the 2.66 USDC from the five previous tests. Until 15:30 UTC on September 16, the spoke recorded nine USDC events, three addresses with deposits, and two with loans.

LlamaRisk, the DAO's risk provider, published round 17 of V4 cap adjustments at 13:13:39 UTC with a note on Arc: the instance "reached its initial USDC caps within hours of launch." It proposed raising the Main Spoke add cap from 56 to 150 million and noted $57,561,558 in total deposits in the Arc hub at that time. V4 cap adjustments are applied "directly through the Aave Security Council" (the DAO's emergency multisig) without a vote: the hub's UpdateSpokeConfig event raising the add cap to 150 million is timed at 15:30:08 UTC, two hours and sixteen minutes after the post and one minute and forty-four seconds before the first deposit exceeding 56 million. With the expanded quota, 0xed20…09ad completed its 25 million at 17:39 and 0xe7df…b12c added 48 million on the 17th at 21:00. Eight days later, this remains the only configuration change for the spoke: there has been no round 18.

How is the Aave V4 Arc depositor list reconstructed from spoke events?

The reading is reproducible using a public Arc RPC node (chainId 5042, rpc.mainnet.arc.io) without keys. Addresses are sourced from the address book maintained by BGD Labs for the DAO: the hub is 0x17288dfc…F79C and the Main Spoke is 0xB843…134d. On the hub, getAsset(0) returns the USDC asset (Arc's native token, at 0x3600…0000, with six decimals in its ERC-20 interface) with liquidity, addedShares, drawnShares, fees, and rate; getSpoke(0, spoke) returns, for each connected spoke, its shares, add cap, and draw cap. Four spokes are attached to USDC: Main, Forex, Treasury, and a tokenization spoke that issues a deposit token.

On the Main Spoke, eth_getLogs with the three event topics Supply, Withdraw, and Borrow (signature (uint256 reserveId, address caller, address user, uint256 shares, uint256 amount) per Aave V4's ISpoke.sol) returns 6,383 records between block 18,791,520 (September 2, 14:32:47 UTC) and 22,570,744 (September 24, 19:59:05 UTC); filtered by reserveId 0 (USDC), there are 1,739 Supply, 953 Withdraw, and 889 Borrow events. The public RPC accepts batches of up to 10,000 blocks and applies a rate limit. The net per address is the sum of its Supply minus the sum of its Withdraw events. Starting the scan at the deployment block, rather than the market opening block (20,845,058, September 14 at 16:02:52 UTC), ensures no deposits are missed.

What this method cannot reach is the source of the funds. On Arc, USDC is the native token, like ETH on Ethereum: an account balance changes without emitting a Transfer event, and the three addresses received their 122.5 million as native value. A scan of Transfer events for the ERC-20 contract between blocks 19,900,000 and 20,980,000 (September 9 to 15) finds only one transfer to them: 0.10 USDC to 0xa466…97b0 the day before launch. Tracing the rest requires an explorer with internal transactions, and Arc's explorer still did not provide programmatic access as of September 24.

How much USDC has been borrowed on Aave V4 on Arc and what fees does it generate?

At block 22,570,744 (September 24, 19:59:05 UTC), the hub recorded 50,996,997 USDC in drawnShares (the outstanding debt of all spokes; 50,990,710 in the Main Spoke) out of 143,403,414 deposited: 35.56%. This jump occurred that same day. On September 19, outstanding debt was 795,091 USDC (0.64%); the Main Spoke's draw cap has remained at 51,000,000 since September 16, meaning USDC credit is 99.98% utilized, with 9,290 USDC remaining free. Main Spoke Borrow events total 52,521,748 gross USDC spread across 154 addresses; the difference from outstanding debt represents repayments. The USDC lending rate (drawnRate, expressed in ray, the 27-decimal unit Aave uses for rates and indices) was 1.62% APR. At that rate, 50,996,997 USDC generates $826,194 in interest per year; with the 10% fee the hub retains on USDC interest (liquidityFee), the DAO's share is $82,619 per year, or $226 per day. The asset's realizedFees field showed 151.33 USDC accumulated since inception, and DefiLlama records between $0.03 and $3.39 in daily fees for Arc from September 16 to 23, and $1,248 on the 24th up to 20:00 UTC.

The 49 million that filled the cap came from a single account. 0x6ebb…936a deposited 0.01 and then 899.99 cirBTC (tokenized BTC on Arc) between 03:10 and 03:14 UTC on September 24, requested a 100 USDC test loan at 03:16, took 44,999,900 at 03:19, added 90 more cirBTC at 04:19, and closed with another 4,000,000 at 04:20: 49,000,000 USDC against 990 of the Main Spoke's 1,003.21 cirBTC—98.7% of the market's Bitcoin collateral. The second borrower is 0x870c…60ee, with 973,826 USDC across 642 operations; the third, 0xc1cdaa…48b6, deposited 500 WETH at 18:27 UTC on the 24th and took 750,211 USDC one minute later. The remaining 151 borrowers total 1,797,711 gross USDC. CryptoSlate estimated utilization at around 0.1% on September 17 and AMBCrypto at 0.46% on the 18th; it was 0.64% on the 19th and 35.56% on the 24th, following eight transactions from two addresses.

What does the Aave ARFC guarantee the DAO for the Arc deployment?

The June 19 ARFC contains an economic clause: "the Aave DAO is expected to receive a minimum of $2 million per year in protocol revenue from the Aave V4 deployment on Arc, with any deficit covered by certain Arc ecosystem participants for the first five years following deployment." The text does not define "protocol revenue," does not name the participants covering the deficit, does not set a payment schedule, nor does it say how the difference is settled. The Snapshot vote approved it with no votes against.

In hub terms, the revenue the contract produces is the liquidityFee: the portion of interest paid by borrowers that the hub retains, accumulates in realizedFees, and sends to the fee receiver, which on Arc is the Treasury Spoke, 0xcbd4…0e15. The fee is not the same for all assets: 10% for USDC and EURC, 20% for cirBTC, and 15% for WETH, according to each asset's getAsset. The guarantee equates to $5,479 per day. In the ten days since the hub opened the market on September 14, it has realized 151.33 USDC: 2.8% of what the guarantee covers in a single day.

Can the Aave V4 market on Arc pay the $2 million per year with its draw caps?

The answer does not depend on how much credit demand appears, because draw caps limit it from above. Each spoke's draw cap is the maximum that spoke can borrow from the hub for its asset; summing the four assets and valuing them at September 24 prices (EURC $1.1372, BTC $84,382.74, ETH $2,694.75), the maximum credit the Arc hub can have outstanding is $124.2 million. This maximum ceased to be theoretical on September 24: 51.0 of those 124.2 million are already in use, representing all available USDC.

CleanSky calculation: applying the respective fee to each asset, the hub would retain $14.92 million for every 100% average rate with all draw caps occupied for twelve months; thus, the $2 million requires an average lending rate of 13.4%. If credit is concentrated in USDC, where all measurable demand lies ($62 million draw cap between Main and Forex), the required rate jumps to 32.3%. On September 24, that USDC segment is 99.98% occupied at a 1.62% rate, and the interest it produces yields the DAO $82,619 per year: 4.1% of the $2 million, with the USDC credit line full. The rate rose from 0.029% to 1.62% when utilization climbed from 0.64% to 35.56%; with the draw cap full, that utilization can no longer grow, and neither can the accompanying rate. With the caps approved on September 6 and expanded on the 16th—the add cap, not the draw cap—the Arc market cannot generate the $2 million promised to the DAO on its own: the difference is paid, by design, by the "ecosystem participants" the proposal does not name, unless "protocol revenue" includes items the ARFC does not define, such as liquidations. A USDC draw cap of 500 million would change the arithmetic (the required rate would drop to around 3.3% with full utilization); as of September 24, there is no such proposal in the forum, and the hub records no cap changes since the 16th.

The three accounts are not borrowing: their balances outside the hub were 12.43 USDC, 12.48, and 0.66 on September 24.

What is Arc's weight in Aave V4's TVL and fees?

On September 24, Aave V4 had $631.57 million in TVL according to DefiLlama, distributed across Ethereum ($426.20 million), Arc ($180.36), and Avalanche ($25.01); Arc represents 28.6% of V4 eight days after launch. Valuing the Arc hub liquidity with the on-chain reading (92.41 million USDC, 1.371 million EURC, 998.79 cirBTC, and 912.19 WETH at daily prices) yields $180.7 million, so the aggregator is not inflating the figure. What has changed is the composition: USDC was 97.7% of the hub on September 19 and is 51.1% on the 24th, because the 990 cirBTC that entered that morning are worth $84 million. Aave V3 had $18,205.8 million in TVL in the same snapshot: V4 is 3.35% of the combined V3 and V4 total.

In terms of fees, V4's share remains half of its TVL share: $614,891 in the 30 days leading up to September 24 compared to $35.44 million for V3, or 1.71%. The gap stems from Arc. On Ethereum, where V4 has been live since March 30, V4's share of daily fees ($24,642 vs. $927,776 for V3) is 2.59%, and its TVL share ($426.20 vs. $15,371.1 million) is 2.70%: for every dollar deposited, V4 earns the same on Ethereum as V3. Arc contributes 28.6% of V4's TVL and, on the first day its credit was fully used, 4.7% of its fees.

V4 grew from $396.3 million in TVL on September 14 to $631.6 on the 24th: $235.3 million more in ten days, a 59.4% increase, of which Arc provides 180.4 (76.6%); within Arc, four accounts hold 142.5 of the 143.4 million USDC. This jump is the largest since launch: TVL was $1.1 million on March 30, $155.0 on July 6, and $350.6 on August 31. Read as adoption of the hub-and-spoke architecture of the Aave V4 master plan, Arc must be discounted from V4's TVL; read as demand for Circle's chain (Arc vs Tempo), the network's second-largest protocol by deposits is sustained by four addresses. That same week, on September 19 at 15:06 UTC, the DAO executed AIP 521—approved with 371,351 AAVE votes in favor and none against—to retire fifty low-adoption reserves and six entire V3 deployments, following the exodus of contributors we covered in the Aave governance crisis: Arc's guaranteed $2 million is a contractually committed income in a year when the DAO is cutting back.

What would invalidate the thesis on Aave V4 on Arc before October 16, 2026?

The thesis is that Arc has 143.4 million USDC deposited, 85.4% in three accounts, in a market that by cap design cannot cover its own guarantee even with full credit utilization. This will be verified on October 16, 2026, 30 days after launch, using the same reading: Main Spoke events from block 18,791,520 and the hub's getSpoke. It fails if:

1. the share of the three addresses falls below 50% with the total above 100 million: entry would have been broad-based. It was 98.1% on September 19 and 85.4% on the 24th, and the drop comes from a fourth address with 20 million, not hundreds of small ones;
2. borrowed USDC exceeds 10% of deposited USDC: this was met on September 24, with 35.56% and the draw cap 99.98% occupied. There is credit demand, and this part of the September 19 reading is refuted; what does not change is the income, because the rate corresponding to that peak utilization is 1.62%;
3. a USDC draw cap is raised to make the $2 million achievable at market rates: with the cap full, this is the natural path, but LlamaRisk round 18 does not yet exist in the forum;
4. the daily fee series for Arc on DefiLlama sustainedly exceeds $5,479: Arc would pay for itself and the deficit would be zero. It was $1,248 on the 24th, versus $3.39 the previous day;
5. V4's share of fees (1.71% on September 24) equals its share of TVL (3.35%): Arc's money would have started producing.

If the TVL share continues to double the fee share, Aave V4's TVL will continue to count 143.4 million that produce $226 a day for the DAO, guaranteed at $5,479 by third parties the proposal does not name.

Sources and links: Aave Forum — ARFC "Deploy Aave V4 on Arc" (Jun 19, 2026) · Aave Forum — LlamaRisk, cap adjustment round 17 (Sep 16, 2026) · Snapshot — ARFC vote (Sep 6, 2026) · Aave Forum — AIP 521, reserve retirement and V3 deployment deprecation · Aave DAO — Aave V4 Arc address book · Aave V4 — ISpoke.sol (Supply, Withdraw, Borrow events) · Aave V4 — IHub.sol (getAsset, getSpoke) · Arc Docs — USDC as native token and gas · Aave — V4 changelog · Circle — Arc mainnet press release (Sep 16, 2026) · DefiLlama — Aave V4 by chain · DefiLlama — Aave V4 fees · CryptoSlate (Sep 17, 2026) · AMBCrypto (Sep 18, 2026)