Circle has officially launched the mainnet for Arc, a layer 1 blockchain designed for financial markets. The network debuted with over 100 institutional partners and validators, including major industry players such as BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, and ICE.
The platform features USDC-denominated gas fees, sub-second finality, and support for tokenized real-world assets. It integrates Circle StableFX for cross-currency settlements and the Circle Payments Network for cross-border transactions. The ecosystem currently supports trading platforms like Uniswap and Aero.
Arc is designed to accommodate AI agents as economic participants, with USDC accounting for 98.8% of their transaction volume. Developers can utilize the Circle Agent Stack and Arc Studio to build applications on the EVM-compatible network.
The company has completed the genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens, though it clarified that this is a technical milestone and not a commitment to a public token launch. The project roadmap includes a transition to Proof of Stake in 2027 and plans to scale capacity to over 100,000 transactions per second.
