Circle's Arc Blockchain Goes Live on Mainnet
Circle's new Layer-1 blockchain, Arc, has gone live on mainnet. This 'Economic OS for the internet' is designed to support markets, real-time value movement, tokenized assets, and agentic economic activity.
Arc uses USDC as native gas and is secured by a permissioned set of institutional validators at launch. Circle built Arc with deterministic sub-second finality and stable transaction costs in mind, addressing volatile gas fees and uncertain finality on existing blockchains.
The company first introduced Arc on August 12, 2025, as an EVM-compatible Layer-1 purpose-built for stablecoin finance. Over a year later, the public testnet was launched on October 28, 2025, with more than 100 ecosystem and enterprise builders already active on private mainnet.