How Hibachi Is Bringing FX Price Discovery to Arc

FX is the largest financial market in the world, with roughly $8.4 trillion traded daily, yet there is still no institutional-grade venue for stablecoin-native FX liquidity and price discovery. Stablecoins have become a meaningful global settlement rail, but FX liquidity remains fragmented across OTC desks, bilateral relationships, exchanges, and payment networks. As a result, the benefits of stablecoin infrastructure have yet to realize the full potential of cost savings, reduced settlement-related counterparty risk, public price information and public access.

Unlike most digital asset markets, FX is overwhelmingly institutional and driven by participants that care about execution quality, liquidity, settlement certainty, and operational reliability. Existing onchain venues have generally not been designed around these requirements, preventing liquidity from concentrating, and thereby limiting adoption. Hibachi is building an institutional FX venue on Arc: combining institution-grade execution with stablecoin-based settlement to create a venue where FX liquidity can concentrate and price discovery can occur.

Hibachi is building this as part of the Arc Builders Fund.

What Hibachi is building

Hibachi is building a high-performance central limit order book (CLOB) for FX liquidity and price discovery. The architecture separates execution from settlement so each layer can optimize for the performance, reliability, and compliance requirements of modern FX markets.

On Hibachi, order matching runs offchain through a CLOB, delivering the low-latency execution and throughput expected by professional trading firms. By decoupling execution from settlement, Hibachi preserves speed where it matters most while allowing settlement to occur onchain. Margin updates, liquidations, withdrawals, and other state transitions are captured as zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and verified on Arc, providing cryptographic assurance without compromising performance.

Zero-knowledge proofs enable Hibachi to prove the correctness of state transitions without exposing sensitive trading activity or participant data. This allows settlement to remain transparent in the market with counterparty privacy and verifiable while execution remains fast, efficient, and private.

Arc provides deterministic settlement finality and proof verification, while execution and market operations remain offchain. The result is a venue capable of supporting institutional FX activity with the responsiveness of traditional electronic markets and the transparency and auditability of onchain settlement.

Why Arc for FX 

A professional FX venue like Hibachi has specific infrastructure requirements that traditional blockchains and DeFi platforms fail to meet. Institutional participants demand:

• Settlement certainty, which impacts not only the risk and margin models but also promotes legal and operational predictability for large-scale trades.
• Gas cost predictability, necessary for strategy economics and managing operational costs across high-frequency or large-volume activity.
• Robust privacy and access controls, crucial for compliance, confidentiality, and risk management.

Arc's design addresses each of these requirements directly:

Deterministic finality

Arc settles transactions with deterministic, sub-second finality — meaning trades are confirmed, with no probabilistic delay. For FX, this reduces ambiguity around position state, allowing risk models and post-trade processes to be built around deterministic settlement outcomes rather than probabilistic chains. This helps address a major pain point for institutions that require certainty for margin calls and liquidations.

Stablecoin-denominated gas

Arc uses stablecoins like USDC as gas. Transaction fees are paid in stablecoins rather than volatile gas tokens. For institutional trading desks, this reduces the risk of fluctuating operational costs, meaning that transaction expenses can be forecasted and budgeted like any conventional line item. This is especially critical for programmatic execution bots, market makers, and OMS-integrated flows where high transaction volumes would otherwise introduce variability.

Opt-in privacy

Arc will support configurable privacy with selective disclosure. For professional desks managing client flow, order routing, and proprietary position data, complete transparency is not desirable or allowed by policy. Following Arc's opt-in privacy go-live, Arc's privacy design will enable Hibachi to provide institutions with the confidentiality controls they require, without sacrificing the auditability and compliance guarantees necessary for regulated participation.

Inside the architecture

The following shows how execution and settlement flow through Hibachi and Arc:

For developers integrating with Hibachi, the primary interface surfaces are REST and WebSocket APIs. The REST layer supports order placement, account management, and position queries. WebSocket provides streaming market data and execution feeds, which are essential for any reactive system such as signal-driven execution bots, OMS (Order Management System) modules, or real-time data pipelines.

Collateral movement to and from Arc is facilitated via Circle CCTP. This capability enables teams with multichain treasury operations to transfer collateral directly to Arc, eliminating the friction and risk associated with relying on third-party bridges.

Market design

Hibachi will initially launch with FX perpetuals and expand into FX spot, creating a comprehensive venue for institutional FX trading. Its goal is to build a venue where FX liquidity can concentrate and stablecoin-native price discovery can occur across both spot and derivatives markets.

The venue is being designed from day one around the requirements of institutional participants, including permissioned access, market surveillance, reporting, and operational reliability.

“Despite being the largest financial market in the world, FX remains surprisingly opaque. Price discovery is concentrated within the interbank market, access remains limited, and settlement infrastructure was built for a different era. We believe stablecoins create an opportunity to rebuild FX from the ground up. Arc's unique combination of opt-in privacy and compliance-readiness makes it an ideal foundation for institutional markets, and Hibachi's goal is to become the venue where global FX liquidity and stablecoin-native price discovery converge.” — Varun Kumar, Co-Founder, Hibachi

Launching with FX perps allows Hibachi to bootstrap liquidity and participation, while spot FX expands the venue's ability to support conversion, settlement, treasury management, and broader FX workflows. Together, spot and derivatives create the foundation for a complete FX market, bringing liquidity, execution, and price discovery into a single venue.

How builders can use Hibachi on Arc

Hibachi is architected as a flexible platform, designed to enable a full spectrum of FX and treasury integrations. Whether building new trading workflows or plugging into existing infrastructure, the integration pathways are diverse:

• Market data: The WebSocket feed provides real-time order book depth, trade prints, and funding rate data for FX pairs. Analytics infrastructure, aggregators, and signal generation pipelines can access a high-fidelity onchain-settled FX data source not previously available at this scale.
• Execution bots and OMS modules: The REST API enables programmatic order management and state tracking. Combined with the deterministic settlement events from Arc, systematic execution strategies can operate with reduced uncertainty and latency — crucial for professional, automation-driven FX flows.
• Collateral management via CCTP: For treasury tooling, crosschain margin systems, or custody-adjacent infrastructure, native CCTP support means multichain teams can move collateral directly to Arc without relying on bridges.
• Institutional workflow integrations: The permissioned structure includes KYC flows and advanced access controls as foundational elements. This makes Hibachi an appealing venue for teams building compliance tooling, whitelisting systems, or identity-aware counterparty infrastructure.

Learn more about Hibachi on Arc

Arc is open, EVM-compatible, and deeply integrated with Circle's platform, including USDC, EURC, CCTP, and Gateway. It offers a holistic foundation for deploying and integrating institutional-grade financial applications like Hibachi’s.

To stay in the loop with Hibachi, visit the platform’s website and follow Hibachi on X for launch updates and integration documentation. You can also visit the Arc docs to get started with your own ideas, and join the Arc community to connect with the builder ecosystem.