Archipelago and $ISLE

1. Arc and the problem

Arc is a Layer 1 blockchain built by Circle. USDC is its native gas token, so every transaction fee on Arc is paid in dollars, and most tokens on it trade against USDC. Launchpads such as Argus Pad and TollyLabs let anyone create a token in seconds. On October 2, 2026, Archipelago was tracking about 2,500 tokens on Arc.

That pace creates three problems for a trader:

• Finding what is trading. New pools open on Arc more than once a minute, so a static list is out of date as soon as it is written.
• Telling real tokens from copies. Tokens named USDC, EURC or after other projects, at addresses that are not the real ones, are common.
• Trading without giving up a key. Trading on a new chain often means pasting a private key into a bot or trusting a website with funds.

Archipelago answers all three: a live market view built from on-chain data, plain warnings about copies and contract risks, and trades signed in the trader's own browser.

2. The terminal

2.1 Market radar

Archipelago runs its own indexer. As new blocks arrive it reads swaps through Arc's Uniswap v4 PoolManager, which all v4 pools share, and through canonical Uniswap v3 pools. It tracks every pool created in the past day, and older pools once someone looks their token up. For each token traded against USDC it keeps the last 24 hours of trading: price, volume, number of trades, liquidity, market cap, and change over 5 minutes, 1 hour and 24 hours. The Trending and New views are ranked from these numbers, and filters narrow them by liquidity, volume, age or a CoinGecko listing.

Several rules keep the numbers honest:

• A transaction that buys and sells the same token is a round trip, usually wash trading, and is left out of volume.
• Tokens launched on Argus Pad, TollyLabs, Archemist, MoonArc, ARK, Long or Minara carry that launchpad's label, each confirmed by reading the launchpad's own contracts.
• Copies are hidden or flagged. Tokens that use USDC's ticker at another address are hidden. A token that takes the name or ticker of one of Circle's assets on Arc (USDC, EURC, USYC, cirBTC), of bridged WETH or of ISLE, including look-alike letters from other alphabets, is flagged as a copy before anyone can buy it.
• A CoinGecko mark appears only when CoinGecko lists the token at that exact contract address on Arc.
• When one removal cuts a token's liquidity by half or more (from at least $500), the token is marked for 24 hours.

2.2 Trading

Each trade is built in the trader's browser and sent through Uniswap's Universal Router and Permit2 contracts, using the token's USDC pool on Uniswap v3 or v4. What is bought, or the USDC from a sale, goes to the trader's own address. Before signing, the trader sees the price impact and the fee, and on a buy the minimum amount received. The slippage limit is 1.5%, and a trade that would fill more than 3% worse than the price shown asks for a second confirmation.

Before a buy, the terminal reads the token's contract and states what it finds in plain words: whether it is a standard upgradeable proxy, whether it has an owner, and whether it has the standard mint or pause functions. These are facts, not a score or an endorsement. They cannot detect a transfer tax or a block on selling, and the terminal says so next to them.

2.3 Wallets and funding

A trader can connect a browser wallet or create a trading wallet in the browser. A created wallet's key is generated on the device and stored only there, encrypted with the trader's passcode (AES-256-GCM, with the key derived by 600,000 rounds of PBKDF2-SHA256). It locks after 30 minutes without input, and pressing Lock in one tab locks every tab. Archipelago's servers never receive the key or the passcode. It is a hot wallet, meant to hold only what the trader is trading with.

The wallet window brings USDC to Arc from Base, Arbitrum, OP Mainnet or Ethereum with Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP). From Solana and other chains, a link opens Relay, an independent bridge, with the trader's Arc address filled in. Archipelago charges nothing for bridging; Circle's and Relay's own fees apply.

2.4 The site

The site runs only its own code, with no third-party scripts, and its Content Security Policy enforces that. It counts a few steps, such as a visit, a quote shown or a trade sent, as anonymous daily totals, with no wallet address, ID or cookie. Two servers in different data centers run the terminal and its indexer behind a load balancer that moves traffic to the second one if the first fails.

3. Fees and the treasury

Archipelago charges 0.5% of each trade, always in USDC: from the USDC paid in on a buy, and from the USDC received on a sale. On a sale the fee is at most $25 on a sell up to $250,000 and 0.01% above that. The terminal's current code refuses any rate above 1%. The fee is shown before the trader signs and is paid inside the trade's own transaction, directly to the treasury.

The treasury is a Safe multisig on Arc at 0xDcf7a2683aCaaC06E85a50c15BAf59c8E8b1e681 (Safe v1.4.1). Moving anything out of it takes signatures from 2 of its 3 owner keys. The Treasury page shows all-time totals and recent receipts, each with its transaction, and the Safe can be inspected in the Safe{Wallet} app.

The treasury's policy: half of the terminal's fees are for buying and burning $ISLE as the treasury grows, and the other half funds operations. The fees are not held in separate accounts, and there is no fixed schedule or amount. As of October 2, 2026, no buyback has been made. Each buyback will appear on the Treasury page as an outflow. The treasury also receives half of ISLE's creator fees (section 4.3), listed there as $ISLE creator fees.

4. The $ISLE token

4.1 Contract and supply

$ISLE is an ERC-20 token on Arc at 0x3945DF1f8dD8F753FB62e428f3AaEB2c185a6E26. Its on-chain name is ARCHIPELAGO, its symbol ISLE, and it has 18 decimals. All 1,000,000,000 ISLE were created at launch. The contract has no owner and no mint, pause or blacklist function, and it is not an upgradeable proxy, so the supply can never grow and the rules cannot change. Sending ISLE from one wallet to another is not taxed.

4.2 Launch and liquidity

ISLE launched on Argus Pad on October 1, 2026 at 14:02:31 UTC, in Arc block 23,720,322. The whole supply went into a single Uniswap v4 position paired with USDC, covering every price from the opening price up, so every ISLE in circulation was bought from the pool. There was no presale and no allocation to the team. The creator is Archipelago's team. In the launch transaction the creator's wallet bought 29,345,661 ISLE (2.93% of the supply) from the pool for 75 USDC, and as part of the launch that purchase paid no pool fee. On October 2, 2026 the wallet held 27,332,082 ISLE (2.73%), after buying more and burning 17,627,751.

The position (Uniswap v4 position 280043) is owned by ISLE's locker contract. The locker's deployed code has no function to withdraw, reduce or transfer the position. Its only liquidity action adds to it and reverts if the position's liquidity would fall, and no other address is approved to move the position. The liquidity can only grow, and no one, including the creator and Argus, can remove it.

4.3 The trading fee and where it goes

Buys and sells through ISLE's pool pay 2% of their USDC value, charged by the pool's hook: the 1% base fee of Argus pools plus ISLE's own tax of 1%, the lowest Argus allows. In the first seconds after launch an extra anti-sniping fee also applied, and the escrow's own buys pay no fee. The hook has no function to change either rate. It sends the whole 2% to ISLE's fee escrow, which divides it:

Argus takes its 30% first, and the remaining 70% is divided 55% to the creator, 25% to burns and 20% to liquidity. These percentages are fixed in the escrow. The creator share is paid in USDC. Its 50/50 division between the creator's wallet and the treasury is set in Argus's creator registry; the creator can change it there, and any change is public on-chain.

Trading ISLE through Archipelago adds Archipelago's own 0.5% fee (section 3), as for any other token.

4.4 Burns

ISLE is burned by sending it to the dead address 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD, which no one controls, so those tokens can never move again. The contract's total supply still reads 1,000,000,000, because burned tokens are made unspendable rather than destroyed. ISLE reaches the dead address mainly in three ways:

• The burn share of every trading fee buys ISLE from the pool and sends it there.
• ISLE left over when the liquidity share is added to the position is sent there too.
• Treasury buybacks under Archipelago's policy (section 3), when made, are burned the same way.

Any holder can also send ISLE there directly. On October 2, 2026, 23,867,020 ISLE (2.39% of the supply) sat at the dead address, including 17,627,751 ISLE that the creator's wallet sent there that day.

4.5 What ISLE is not

Holding ISLE gives no share of Archipelago's revenue, no dividends (its dividend share is 0%), no vote and no claim on the treasury. Its tie to Archipelago is the treasury's buy-and-burn policy and the part of its own trading fees paid to the treasury. Its price is set only by trading, nearly all of it in its Argus pool. Others have opened two more ISLE/USDC pools, each holding a few dollars and charging fees of 70% or more.

5. Who controls what

6. Risks

• Price. Most new tokens lose most of their value, and ISLE can too. Its pool is small, so trades move its price.
• Contracts. Trades rely on Uniswap's contracts, Permit2, Argus Pad's launch contracts and Arc itself. A flaw in any of them could cause losses. The facts about ISLE's contracts in this paper were read from their deployed code.
• Checks. The terminal's contract checks catch common traps, not all of them.
• Wallets. A trading wallet created in the browser is only as safe as the device and the passcode.
• Other services. Circle's CCTP, Relay and data providers are outside Archipelago's control.
• Operations. Archipelago's servers can fail or be attacked, and its fee and treasury policy are set by its team and can change.
• Rules. Laws on tokens and trading tools differ by country and change over time.

7. History

• September 28, 2026. The terminal went live at archipelagodex.xyz with the market radar, trading and an in-browser trading wallet.
• September 29. USDC bridging from Base, Arbitrum, OP Mainnet and Ethereum with CCTP; the wash-trade filter and copy flags; the cap on the sell fee.
• September 30. A second server in another data center with automatic failover, and labels for Argus Pad, TollyLabs and Archemist launches.
• October 1. The Guide page with its security section, and labels for four more launchpads. $ISLE launched on Argus Pad. Relay links for bridging from Solana and other chains.
• October 2. Half of ISLE's creator fees routed to the treasury, CoinGecko marks on the radar, and this whitepaper.

8. Addresses and links

All contracts are on Arc mainnet (chain ID 5042). Dates in this paper are in UTC.

• Terminal: archipelagodex.xyz
• Treasury, with fee totals and recent receipts: archipelagodex.xyz/treasury
• Guide and security notes: archipelagodex.xyz/guide
• X: @archipelagodex
• ISLE on GeckoTerminal and DexScreener

9. Notice

This paper describes Archipelago and ISLE as of October 2, 2026. It will be updated when they change, under a new version number. Version 1.1, published the same day as version 1.0, corrects several details after an independent check. It is not an offer to sell anything, not a solicitation and not financial advice, and it promises no price, return or buyback schedule.

Archipelago is independent. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Circle, Arc, Uniswap, Argus Pad, Safe, Relay, GeckoTerminal, DexScreener or CoinGecko. Their names appear only to describe how Archipelago works with them.