Circle Launches Arc Mainnet With USDC (USDC) as Gas and 11 Wall Street Validators

Arc Mainnet Goes Live

Circle switched on the public mainnet of Arc on Wednesday, making USDC the native gas asset of its purpose-built Layer 1 for stablecoin payments and capital markets. Transaction fees on the new chain are paid directly in the dollar stablecoin rather than a volatile network token, and settlement is deterministic and final in under one second. Arc is EVM-compatible, so Solidity contracts written elsewhere run on it unchanged, and the chain natively supports more than 20 fiat-anchored currencies beyond USDC — among them EURC, JPYC, KRW1 and TRYB — letting businesses settle multi-currency flows on a single ledger. Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol and Gateway connect the network to more than 20 other blockchains, while its StableFX module runs around-the-clock foreign-exchange settlement across USDC, EURC, GBPA, JPYC and KRW1. More than 100 applications were live on day one: Aave's V4 lending market, Morpho and Uniswap anchor on-chain credit and trading, Rain, Tunes and Wirex cover payments — a distribution race Coinbase is also running by wiring USDC to more than 1,000 community banks via Moov — and Kraken, MetaMask, Binance Wallet, Fireblocks, Ledger and Upbit joined among wallets and trading venues. Circle first outlined Arc in August 2025, opened a public testnet that October, and reports the testnet cleared more than 700 million transactions in under a year; over 100 institutions and ecosystem developers joined a private mainnet ahead of Wednesday's launch.

Eleven Institutions Validate the Chain

The founding validator cohort reads like a Wall Street roster. BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, Intercontinental Exchange, Standard Chartered, Galaxy, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Sumitomo Corporation and Global Payments — formerly Worldpay — will operate validator nodes alongside Circle in a phased rollout. ICE's Michael Blaugrund said institutional clients have long flagged friction in on-chain fee payment and settlement, and that Arc's predictable fees and instant finality answer those complaints. Tokenized assets are native from the start: BlackRock's BUIDL fund, at roughly $2.4 billion, and Circle's USYC money-market token, above $3 billion, can be traded, lent against and posted as collateral, with BlackRock planning to deploy BUIDL directly so investors subscribe and redeem inside one on-chain environment. Circle and DTCC are also weighing tokenization of assets held at the DTC depository from the second half of next year. Notably, Visa already books $7 billion in annualized USDC settlement, and both Visa and SBI straddle competing rails — SBI holds roughly 9% of Ripple and runs XRPL remittances in Japan, while Mastercard has folded Ripple's RLUSD into its network across eight chains — placing them across payment networks rather than committing to one. Opt-in confidential transactions with view keys for banks remain in development.

10 Billion ARC Minted, No Sale Promise

Circle minted the full opening supply of 10 billion ARC in the United States this week, becoming the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new Layer 1 — but the company stressed the mint is not a commitment to a public token launch. ARC is designed to eventually coordinate network security, utility and governance token functions, while fees stay payable in USDC. Separate disclosures indicate 740 million ARC changed hands at $0.30 apiece, raising $222 million from buyers including BlackRock, Andreessen Horowitz and Apollo, though Circle has framed the genesis mint itself as a technical milestone with any public offering still undecided. The chain currently runs under a proof-of-authority model with a permissioned validator set, and a shift to proof of stake is under exploration for 2027. CEO Jeremy Allaire called Arc the most important product launch in Circle's history since USDC, saying the stablecoin was step one and Arc is the network built for what comes next. The roadmap includes a dedicated payment environment exceeding 100,000 transactions per second, quantum-resistant signatures already supported, and developer tooling spanning Arc Studio's AI coding agent, Arc App Kits and a forthcoming AgentVM for sensitive data. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

2027 PoS Shift in Focus

The through-line in Wednesday's launch is Circle's evolution from stablecoin issuer into full-stack infrastructure: USDC, with more than $74 billion in circulation, now has a native chain whose fees settle in the asset itself. Circle's official launch post frames Arc as infrastructure for programmable money, global markets and AI agent economic activity — a bet that follows data showing USDC carried 99.6% of x402 agent payment volume. In our reading, Arc functions today as an institutional appchain rather than a credibly neutral public network, and the credibility tests are concrete: delivering the 2027 move from proof of authority to proof of stake, and shipping network-wide confidential transactions that banks can actually use.

Circle's official launch posthttps://x.com/circle/status/2100170801240543557