Fees

ArcNS is designed to be simple: you pay once and own your name forever. There are no renewals, no subscriptions, and no expiry dates, in any of the three namespaces (@handle, .arc, .circle). Here's the full picture.

One-time registration

Registering a name is a single, one-time payment in USDC — Arc's own gas and settlement asset, so one balance covers both the fee and the price. After that, the name is yours to keep; you never pay again to hold it.

Priced by length

Shorter names cost more. Here's the current launch price at every length for @handle — one payment to register, plus an optional one-time fee if you ever want to tokenize the handle:

.arc and .circle pricing

The two TLD namespaces share the same length-tier shape at half of @handle's ceiling per length: launch prices of 12,500 / 1,250 / 125 / 25 / 5 / 2.5 / 1.25 USDC for lengths 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6–9 / 10+, with ceilings of 50,000 / 5,000 / 500 / 100 / 20 / 10 / 5. .circle is priced identically to .arc. A .arc or .circle name is an ERC-721 token from the moment it's registered (the verbatim ENS registrar), so there is no tokenize fee for a TLD name.

Reserved names

Some names aren't available for ordinary registration. At genesis, 20,307 reserved names were minted to the ArcNS treasury in each of the three namespaces — the same list across @handle, .arc and .circle — and resolve today to the treasury as their controller with no payment address set. Three things can happen to a reserved name:

• Blocked outright. System words, lookalike variants and a profanity list — never registrable by anyone, including us. This is the impersonation-risk tier.
• Released free to the rightful holder. Trademarks, tickers and well-known identities are held, not sold: a company proves it controls its domain (the app's claim page verifies a DNS record), a person is verified by hand, and the name is released at no charge. Charging someone for their own name would be exactly the behavior this list exists to prevent.
• Sellable as premium inventory — short names and sought-after words — through the marketplace at a multiplier over the length price, rather than by ordinary registration. The marketplace is not live yet (see What you can do), so this tier is simply held for now.

The 2% marketplace fee

When a name is sold through ArcNSMarket — a fixed-price listing, an accepted offer, or an auction — a 2% fee applies to the sale. If you're just registering and holding your own name, this never touches you; it only applies when a name changes hands through a sale. ArcNSMarket is already deployed and configured on Arc testnet, with sales fees flowing to the treasury — but the app's /marketplace page is still behind a feature flag that hasn't been switched on yet (see What you can do), so no sale can happen through the app today; the fee is recorded here because it is fixed in the same pricing config as everything else.

Optional: tokenizing a @handle

A @handle is soulbound by default: it moves only through an explicit transfer call by its owner, through recovery, or (once the marketplace ships) a sale — not like an ordinary token. Turning it into a fully transferable, standard ERC-721 (so it can move through any NFT tooling) is entirely optional and carries its own separate one-time fee (the "Tokenize" column above — also priced by length, and much smaller than registration). Most holders never need this. If you never tokenize, you never pay it.

Registering through the API

Agents that register through registration-as-a-service pay the same on-chain price plus the gas of the two transactions and a small margin, in one x402 payment; the 402 challenge states the exact total before anything is settled. On testnet the gas component is visible in that total, because Arc's gas floor is 20 Gwei in USDC.

At a glance

Questions

Questions: [email protected].