Circle Debuts Arc Mainnet, a Layer 1 Blockchain for Financial Markets

Circle has launched its Arc mainnet, a purpose-built Layer 1 blockchain designed for financial markets and the AI agent economy. The network's native gas token is USDC, with over $74 billion currently in circulation.

Major institutions including BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, and Standard Chartered serve as inaugural validators on the Arc platform. This structure is positioned by Circle as advantageous for financial institutions, providing established governance protocols for deploying public chain infrastructure in treasury management, trading operations, and confidential payment systems.

The Arc network facilitates over 20 fiat-denominated stablecoins, spanning USDC, EURC, JPYC, KRW1, and TRYB. Network interoperability extends across more than 20 additional blockchains via Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) and Gateway solutions.

Circle executed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens while clarifying no guarantee of public token distribution. The organization highlighted this achievement positions them as the inaugural publicly traded entity to mint a network token for a novel Layer 1 blockchain, with a prior funding round securing $222 million through an Arc token presale, establishing a $3 billion network valuation.