Circle launches Arc Mainnet, an economic operating system (OS) for the internet

Secured by the institutions that run the world’s financial infrastructure, Arc goes live with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders on day one, offering a new era in blockchain networks, and built for the Agentic Economic Era.

‍Circle Internet Group, Inc. (NYSE: CRCL), one of the world’s leading internet financial platform companies, announced the public mainnet launch of Arc, an open Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for financial markets, real-time money movement, and agentic economic activity. Arc launches with native integration into Circle’s full-stack platform (including USDC, the world’s largest regulated digital dollar, with more than $74 billion in circulation); a founding validator cohort drawn from the institutions that run global finance; more than 100 applications; and more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders spanning global banks, asset managers, payment networks, exchanges, custodians, DeFi protocols, wallets, and AI platforms live on day one.

“Arc is the single most significant launch in Circle’s history since USDC itself, and it is the embodiment of the premise we have operated on for thirteen years: money should work the way the internet works,” said Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Circle. “USDC was step one. Arc is the network built for what comes next. The agentic economy and the onchain economy are not two different revolutions; they are the same economy seen from two sides, and both need infrastructure that never closes, settles in under a second, and is trusted by the institutions that anchor the global financial system. Today we are switching on something the world has never had before: an open, neutral, always-on economic operating system for the internet, secured by some of the most important financial institutions on Earth, and built for a world where both people and machines transact.”

AN ECONOMIC OPERATING SYSTEM, NOT JUST A BLOCKCHAIN

Six design choices set Arc apart and power onchain finance across payments, FX, trading, lending, markets, and asset issuance:

1. Gas in dollars. Fees are paid in USDC, with no volatile native token required.
2. Sub-second finality. Deterministic, instant settlement. Final means final.
3. Opt-in privacy. Confidential transactions and balances with view keys; in development for network-wide release.
4. Issuers and interoperability. A home for USDC, EURC, and tokenized real-world assets, with Circle StableFX providing 24/7 cross-currency settlement.
5. Agentic economic activity. The first blockchain designed from genesis for AI agents as economic actors.
6. Institutional security. Post-quantum signatures supported today and deterministic consensus built to financial market standards.

Money without borders. Circle StableFX, enables 24/7 programmable FX trading with near-instant, low-cost settlement. Local stablecoins that are active or onboarding to StableFX include: USDC, EURC, AUDD, AUDF, BRLA, CADD, CHFAU, EURAU, GBPA, JPYC, KRW1, MXNB, QCAD, SEKAU, TRYB, wARS, wBRL, wCLP, wCOP, wMXN, wPEN, and ZARU. And now Circle Payments Network is integrated natively into Arc, moving money across borders for a fraction of a cent and settling in near real time.‍

Markets that never close. Aero, fomo, and Uniswap anchor Arc’s day one trading infrastructure. Circle’s USYC (a tokenized money market fund), BUIDL (a tokenized treasury fund tokenized by Securitize), private credit funds, and cirBTC give these markets high-quality, liquid, productive assets to trade, lend, and post as collateral.

‍Institutional trust meets open innovation. Arc’s opt-in privacy design, currently in development for network-wide release, provides enterprises with the confidentiality their businesses require and the auditability compliance teams look for, together on one network. Combined with a permissioned validator set and the regulatory clarity of the GENIUS Act, this enables banks, asset managers, and enterprises to use a public blockchain for treasury, trading, and confidential payments.

“As digital assets infrastructure matures, we expect to see certain networks increasingly designed around the needs of specific markets and use cases. Purpose-built blockchains can help accelerate adoption of digital asset use cases, and Arc appears clearly well positioned to serve stablecoin and payment use cases at scale,” said Robbie Mitchnick, Global Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock.

BUILT FOR AGENTS AS ECONOMIC ACTORS

Agents are already performing economic tasks with Circle’s open, programmable payments products, including executing trades, managing payments, routing liquidity, and executing contracts on behalf of people and businesses. USDC accounts for 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume. Since Circle Agent Stack launched in May 2026, the overwhelming majority of agent-to-agent payments settling over the x402 standard have settled in USDC. Arc is the first blockchain designed from genesis for this new class of participant.

• Circle Agent Stack gives developers and agents policy-controlled Agent Wallets, Nanopayments powered by Circle Gateway, and an emerging Agent Marketplace.
• Arc Portal lets people fund agent wallets, set spend limits, and delegate onchain tasks with visibility and control.
• AgentVM is being designed so that agents can work with sensitive data in a protected environment while Arc provides an immutable record that lets applications verify where each result came from without exposing the underlying data.

SUPPORTED BY THE INSTITUTIONS THAT RUN GLOBAL FINANCE

Along with Circle, Arc will have a phased rollout from the founding validator cohort that includes BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay (now Global Payments). The institutions that clear the world’s securities, run its payment rails, and manage its capital are not simply connecting to Arc; they will participate in the operation of the network itself, securing a public blockchain built to meet institutional needs.

“ICE’s institutional customers are increasingly looking for ways to operate seamlessly across traditional and digital markets. Arc’s native capabilities, including predictable fees and instant finality, address real friction points these customers raised,” said Michael Blaugrund, VP, Strategic Initiatives at ICE. “As a founding validator, ICE is applying our experience securing critical market infrastructure in support of Arc itself, reflecting our clients’ emerging demand for tokenized finance.”

“Onchain finance and the agentic economy are areas of intensive focus for SBI Group as well. Our work with Circle already spans a range of initiatives: in March 2025, SBI VC Trade became the first and only company in Japan to distribute USDC,” said Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, Chairman, President & CEO of SBI Holdings. “With Arc, we will not simply be a user of the network: as a founding validator, we will contribute to its operation and governance. SBI Group has also set out SBI APAC Digital Economic Zone initiative, which endeavors to build the next generation onchain financial infrastructure and contribute to the development of the APAC region. Leveraging both USDC and JPYSC – a trust-type yen-pegged stablecoin issued by SBI Shinsei Trust – we look forward to deepening our collaboration with Circle in this area.”

Around the validator core, more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are already live on or exploring Arc’s private mainnet ahead of today’s public launch, including:

• Global banks: BNY, BTG Pactual, HSBC, Lead Bank, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered, and State Street have access to a public blockchain designed to help meet bank regulatory demands, including a permissioned validator model and defined governance perimeter.
• Asset managers and real-world asset (RWA) issuers: Bitwise, BlackRock, Dinari, Janus Henderson, New York Life Investment Management in partnership with Centrifuge, Maple, Matrixdock, ProShares, and xStocks by Payward are working to bring tokenized financial products onchain.
• Global payments firms: Digital Garage, Global Payments, JCB, Mastercard, MoneyGram, Thunes, and Visa will be enabling internet-scale settlement with stablecoins and building always-on and AI-powered global payments.
• Digital asset exchanges: Binance, Bitso, Bitvavo, Bybit, Coinbase, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, MEXC, OKX, OSL, Upbit, and Wenia give users and institutions familiar, seamless access into Arc.
• Custody providers: Anchorage, BitGo, Ceffu, Copper, Fireblocks, and Zodia Custody deliver secure, institutional-grade custody for digital assets on Arc.
• Onchain trading and liquidity protocols: 1inch, Aero, Bankr, Dinari, Doppler, edgeX, Extended, fomo, Hibachi, LI.FI, o1.exchange, pools.trade, Pump.fun, Robinhood, and Uniswap expand access across spot trading, structured products, perpetuals, and crosschain execution in markets that never close.
• Borrow, lend, and earn: Aave and Morpho anchor Arc’s onchain credit markets at launch, with Bitwise, Cumberland, Dialectic, Galaxy, Gauntlet, Keyrock, and Steakhouse Financial supporting the ecosystem in different capacities including through curated vault strategies, risk oversight, and the supply of USDC and EURC for borrowing and lending.
• Digital wallets: Binance Wallet, Bitget Wallet, Gate Web3, Kucoin Web3, Ledger, MetaMask, OKX Wallet, Phantom, Rainbow, and Trust Wallet put Arc’s markets within reach of hundreds of millions of existing users from day one.
• Ecosystem infrastructure and tooling: Alchemy, BCW, Blockdaemon, Chainlink, Figment, Kaleido, and Quicknode power the developer and infrastructure layer supporting builders on Arc.
• Building the agentic economy and the infrastructure to support it: Alethieum, Architect, Arrays, BlockRun, Goldsky, Kite AI, Ornn, Orthogonal, and Virtuals.

“Aave has worked with Circle for years, growing USDC and EURC liquidity into billions of dollars. We’re doubling down on the Circle ecosystem with a new Aave V4 market on Arc, bringing DeFi’s most trusted credit infrastructure to a network purpose-built to bring real-world finance onchain,” said Stani Kulechov, Founder and CEO of Aave Labs.

“Arc brings together the speed, stablecoin-native infrastructure, and institutional participation needed to expand onchain credit to a much broader market. We’re excited for Morpho to serve as a credit layer on Arc, bringing open, composable, and capital-efficient lending markets to the network from the start,” said Merlin Egalite, Co-Founder of Morpho.

Arc’s global developer community includes more than 75,000 active Arc House members and 10,000 Architect ambassadors, who have built more than 1,200 projects on Arc. Its testnet processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year, and Arc is fully EVM-compatible, so existing Solidity contracts and developer tools work on day one.

With mainnet, Circle is releasing two new tools for builders to create stablecoin-native applications without starting from scratch:

• Arc Studio is an onchain coding agent that takes ideas to implementation faster, generating an application complete with smart contracts, application logic, and deployment-ready code for the network.
• Arc App Kits is a unified SDK for core onchain fund flows, letting developers add payments, swaps, onramps, and yield in a few lines of code.

Together with Arc Portal, users, builders, and enterprises have three access points into Arc.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Mainnet is the start of a roadmap centered on proof of stake, privacy, and scalability.

• Network Sectors. Purpose-built environments for different classes of financial activity: a Privacy Sector for opt-in confidential transactions, a Payment Sector targeting low cost payments at more than 100,000 transactions per second, and an Agent Sector for verifiable agent identity and auditable records.
• Proof of stake and the ARC token. Circle completed the genesis mint of ARC token this week in the U.S., creating the full initial supply of 10 billion tokens — making Circle the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new layer-one blockchain. ARC is designed to serve as a digital commodity intended to act as the native coordination mechanism for security, utility, and governance on Arc, with network fees remaining payable in USDC. This initial mint is not a commitment to publicly launch ARC, but an important technical milestone in the Arc roadmap as the network explores a future transition from Proof of Authority toward Proof of Stake in 2027.
• Post-quantum resilience. Arc supports post-quantum signatures today, with broader post-quantum protections in development.

To learn more, read the blog here.