Circle announced Wednesday that Arc, its layer 1 blockchain designed for financial markets and internet-native money movement, is now live on public mainnet.
The network launched with participation from more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders serving as validators and application developers. Founding validators include BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard and Visa among other major financial institutions.
Core Features
Arc is built with financial-market capabilities including USDC-denominated gas fees, sub-second finality and support for tokenized assets and stablecoins. The network supports USDC and EURC alongside tokenized real-world assets.
Circle StableFX enables 24/7 cross-currency settlement, while the Circle Payments Network provides integration for near-real-time cross-border payments. The platform is developing opt-in privacy features including confidential balances, transactions and view-key access.
Day-One Ecosystem
Arc's initial ecosystem includes trading platforms Aero, fomo and Uniswap, as well as asset options including USYC, BUIDL, private credit funds and cirBTC that can be traded, lent or used as collateral.
Circle designed the combination of permissioned validators, institutional participation and privacy architecture to enable banks, asset managers and enterprises to use a public blockchain for treasury management, trading and confidential payments.
AI Agent Integration
Arc is designed to support AI agents as economic participants. Circle noted that agents already use its payment infrastructure to execute trades, manage payments, route liquidity and execute contracts, with USDC accounting for 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume.
The company offers Circle Agent Stack with Agent Wallets, nanopayments through Circle Gateway and an emerging Agent Marketplace. Arc Portal provides controls for wallet funding, spending limits and onchain task delegation.
Development Milestones
More than 75,000 people are part of the Arc House community with 10,000 Architect ambassadors. Over 1,200 projects have been built on Arc. The testnet processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year.
Arc is fully EVM-compatible and Circle has launched Arc Studio and Arc App Kits to help developers build stablecoin-native applications.
Future Roadmap
Circle completed the genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens, which the company characterized as a technical milestone rather than a commitment to publicly launch the token. The company is exploring a transition to Proof of Stake in 2027.
The mainnet launch represents the first stage of a roadmap that includes proof of stake, privacy enhancements and higher scalability. Planned Network Sectors include dedicated environments for confidential transactions, payments targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second and verifiable agent activity.
