Chainstack Expands Support for Circle's USDC-Native Layer 1, Arc Mainnet
Chainstack has expanded its support for Arc Mainnet, a USDC-native Layer 1 built by Circle for institutional stablecoin finance. The network opened to the public on September 17, 2026, with eleven founding validators, including major financial institutions such as BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, and Mastercard.
Arc pairs Reth, which runs transactions, with Malachite, a consensus system that finalizes blocks in about half a second. USDC is Arc's native gas token, providing dollar-denominated transaction costs rather than volatile asset-based costs.
Chainstack offers three deployment models for Arc: Global Nodes, Dedicated Nodes, and Chainstack Self-Hosted. Global Nodes provide auto-scaling, load-balanced RPC endpoints with metered requests, while Dedicated Nodes offer isolated high-performance instances with unlimited requests. Chainstack Self-Hosted allows customers to run Arc's Reth and Malachite infrastructure inside their own environment.
Eugene Aseev, CTO and co-founder of Chainstack, stated that banks, trading firms, and payments startups have different requirements for how and where their nodes run. Chainstack gives them the choice between hosted or self-hosted options without requiring them to become an infrastructure company.