Circle has opened the public mainnet of its Arc blockchain, with USDC (USDC) covering network fees and 11 institutions, including BlackRock, Visa and Mastercard, serving as founding validators.
Key Points:
- Arc went live Sept. 16 with more than 100 applications and over 100 institutional builders.
- Network fees are paid in USDC, and transactions settle in under a second.
- The founding validator group includes asset managers, card networks and market operators.
Circle Arc Mainnet Goes Live
Circle announced the launch on Wednesday, describing Arc as an open Layer 1 network built for financial markets, real-time money movement and transactions run by software agents. More than 100 applications opened on day one, among them Aave V4, Morpho and Uniswap. Over 100 institutional and ecosystem builders joined alongside them.
The chain runs Ethereum Virtual Machine code, so existing Solidity contracts deploy without a rewrite, and settlement is final in under a second. It supports more than 20 fiat-backed stablecoins, including the euro-pegged EURC (EURC), and links to over 20 other blockchains through Circle's cross-chain transfer protocol. Tokenized collateral is available from the first day, including BlackRock's BUIDL fund and Circle's own USYC.
Circle named the validator cohort on Aug. 5, adding DTCC, ICE, Standard Chartered, MoneyGram, Galaxy, SBI Group, Sumitomo Corporation and Worldpay to the three firms named above. The validator set is permissioned. That means a fixed group of regulated companies produces blocks, instead of the open validator market that secures most public chains.
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Jeremy Allaire Frames Circle Bet
Jeremy Allaire, Circle's co-founder and chief executive, called Arc "the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself." The company says the stablecoin now has more than $74 billion in circulation, and it is the asset every fee on the new network is denominated in.
Paying fees in a dollar stablecoin lets treasury desks budget costs in advance, without holding a token whose price they cannot control. Circle is targeting roughly one cent per transaction, and it says USDC already accounts for 98.8% of agent-driven volume. Banks including BNY, HSBC and State Street have access at launch, while Binance, Kraken and OKX provide trading entry points.
For Circle, the timing was awkward. Arc opened one day after the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, which leaves U.S. market structure rules unresolved, and Circle shares slid about 7% on Wednesday.
Arc Testnet And Token Supply
Arc's public testnet opened in October 2025 and has since processed more than 700 million transactions, according to Circle, up from the 502 million its second-quarter filing recorded as of Jun. 30. The company also minted the full 10 billion supply of ARC tokens this week. It said the mint is not a commitment to launch the token publicly, and no ARC trades today.
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