Circle Launches Arc Mainnet With BlackRock, DTCC and Visa Producing Blocks

Circle opened the public mainnet of Arc on Wednesday, a Layer 1 blockchain where transaction fees are paid in USDC and blocks are produced by a fixed set of regulated financial institutions rather than an open validator market.

The chain puts block production in the hands of the firms that clear securities and run card rails. BlackRock, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa and Worldpay make up the founding validator cohort alongside Circle, which named them on Aug. 5. Global Payments completed its $24.25 billion acquisition of Worldpay in January.

Circle counts more than 100 applications and more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders live on day one. Its testnet, which opened in October 2025, processed more than 700 million transactions, and the developer program has more than 75,000 Arc House members.

"Arc is the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself, and it is the embodiment of the premise we have operated on for thirteen years: money should work the way the internet works," Jeremy Allaire, Circle's co-founder, chairman and chief executive, said in the announcement.

Gas In Dollars

Fees on Arc are denominated in USDC with 18 decimals, and the network has no volatile gas token. Arc's fee documentation sets a base fee target of about $0.01 per transaction and caps the base fee at 20,000 Gwei, using EIP-1559 with exponentially weighted moving-average smoothing so traffic spikes move fees less than they do on Ethereum. Arc's landing page put the average weekly transaction cost at $0.045.

Consensus is proof-of-authority over the permissioned set, running Tendermint BFT through Circle's Malachite implementation. Arc's system overview states deterministic finality in under one second with no reorganization risk, and benchmarks finality below 350 milliseconds and throughput above 3,000 transactions per second with 20 validators. Blocks target 30 million gas at a half-second block time. The chain is fully EVM-compatible, so existing Solidity contracts and tooling work at launch.

Validation is restricted but usage is not. Arc's deployment documentation says developers "can deploy contracts and send transactions without approval," while "a fixed group of known, vetted institutions produce and validate blocks." That page puts the validator count at approximately 20 SOC 2-certified operators across multiple regions. Circle's release names 11 institutions and itself, and says the cohort comes online in phases.

Aave And Morpho Anchor Credit

Aave and Morpho supply Arc's lending markets at launch. Aave is deploying a V4 market on the chain, and Bitwise, Cumberland, Dialectic, Galaxy, Gauntlet, Keyrock and Steakhouse Financial are supporting it through curated vault strategies, risk oversight and USDC and EURC supply.

"We're doubling down on the Circle ecosystem with a new Aave V4 market on Arc, bringing DeFi's most trusted credit infrastructure to a network purpose-built to bring real-world finance onchain," said Stani Kulechov, founder and chief executive of Aave Labs.

"Arc brings together the speed, stablecoin-native infrastructure, and institutional participation needed to expand onchain credit to a much broader market," said Merlin Egalite, co-founder of Morpho.

Trading runs through Aero, fomo and Uniswap. Aero is the DEX Dromos Labs created when it merged Aerodrome and Velodrome last November. Circle's Aug. 5 integration list named Aerodrome. The wider trading list runs to 1inch, Bankr, Dinari, Doppler, edgeX, Extended, Hibachi, LI.FI, o1.exchange, pools.trade, Pump.fun and Robinhood. Pools, the Uniswap Labs launchpad, said on Monday it had partnered with Arc as a day-one launchpad, and appears on Circle's list as pools.trade.

Binance, Bitso, Bitvavo, Bybit, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, MEXC, OKX, OSL, Upbit and Wenia provide exchange access. Anchorage, BitGo, Ceffu, Copper, Fireblocks and Zodia Custody provide custody. BNY, BTG Pactual, HSBC, Lead Bank, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered and State Street are the banks Circle names.

The Token Circle Minted

Circle completed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens in the United States this week, and says it is the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new Layer 1. Network fees stay payable in USDC. The company describes the mint as a technical milestone rather than a commitment to launch ARC publicly, and says the network is exploring a shift from proof-of-authority to proof-of-stake in 2027.

Allaire first said Circle was studying a token on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call in February, and gave no launch timeline then. The supply figure and the consensus transition were both set out in the ARC whitepaper Circle published in May. That document allocates 60% of the 10 billion tokens to ecosystem uses including token sales, developer grants and network growth programs, 25% to Circle, and 15% to a long-term reserve. It sets early-phase inflation at roughly 2% to 3% a year on a decaying schedule, and gives holders votes on fees, inflation and burn logic while Circle retains control of protocol development, compliance and validator membership.

Circle has already sold ARC. The company raised $222 million in a presale at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation in May, with a16z crypto putting in $75 million. BlackRock, Apollo Funds, ICE, ARK Invest, SBI Group, Janus Henderson Investors, Standard Chartered Ventures, General Catalyst, IDG Capital, Haun Ventures, Bullish and Marshall Wace also bought. Several of those buyers are now founding validators or named partners. Circle has not disclosed what share of supply the presale covered or its vesting terms.

Agents As Economic Actors

Circle is positioning Arc as the settlement layer for AI agents. It says USDC accounts for 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume and that most agent-to-agent payments settling over the x402 standard have settled in USDC since Circle Agent Stack launched in May. Circle has not published the methodology behind the 98.8% figure.

Agent Stack provides policy-controlled Agent Wallets, Nanopayments through Circle Gateway, and what Circle calls an emerging Agent Marketplace. The Defiant reported when Circle launched Nanopayments across 11 blockchains, which move USDC in amounts as small as $0.000001. Arc Portal lets users fund agent wallets and set spend limits. A component Circle calls AgentVM, which would let agents process sensitive data while Arc records a verifiable log of results, is still in design.

Two developer tools ship with mainnet. Arc Studio is an onchain coding agent that generates contracts, application logic and deployment-ready code. Arc App Kits is an SDK covering payments, swaps, onramps and yield, with yield routed through Morpho.

Twenty-Two Currencies On StableFX

Circle StableFX handles cross-currency settlement on Arc. Circle lists 22 stablecoins as active or onboarding, including USDC, EURC, Brazil's BRLA, Japan's JPYC, Mexico's MXNB and wrapped versions of the Argentine peso, Chilean peso, Colombian peso and Peruvian sol. Circle Payments Network is integrated natively into the chain.

Tradeable assets at launch include Circle's USYC money market fund, BlackRock's BUIDL treasury fund tokenized by Securitize, private credit funds and cirBTC, Circle's wrapped bitcoin. Bitwise, Dinari, Janus Henderson, New York Life Investment Management with Centrifuge, Maple, Matrixdock, ProShares and xStocks by Payward are bringing tokenized products to the chain.

Circle says opt-in privacy, using confidential transactions and balances with view keys, is in development for network-wide release rather than live today. Post-quantum signatures are supported now.

CRCL Falls 11% Into Launch

Circle stock closed at $86.30 on Tuesday, down 11.41% on the day, for a market value of $21.91 billion, Stock Analysis data shows. The shares have traded between $49.90 and $159.47 over the past year. Crypto equities fell on Tuesday after the Senate voted 49-50 against taking up the CLARITY Act, short of the 60 votes cloture needed. Republicans had posted what they called the bill's final text the day before.

USDC had a market value of $73.73 billion on $19.9 billion of 24-hour volume, per CoinGecko. Circle's release puts circulation above $74 billion.

Arc's permissioned design has drawn objections since Circle first described the chain. In the open-versus-permissioned debate The Defiant covered on Aug. 12, Adam Cochran, a partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, said "this isn't an L1 and it's offensive to call it such," arguing that "there are never economic incentives to be a faithful validator, and that's why they have to make it a private consortium." Mitchell DiRaimondo, founder of Steelwave Digital, said the design "isn't DeFi, and that's the point." He added: "Bold? Yes. Terrible? Only if you confuse it with DeFi infrastructure."

Circle is streaming a launch event at 2 p.m. ET and has opened Arc Portal to new users.

Market data as of the Sept. 15 U.S. close and 21:00 UTC on Sept. 15.