- Circle’s Arc mainnet went live Wednesday with over 100 institutional partners, including BlackRock, Mastercard, and VISA.
- Circle minted 10 billion ARC tokens this week, though the company stated this is not a commitment to a public launch.
- USDC serves as the gas token on Arc, which aims to facilitate payments, trading, and agentic economic activity.
Circle launched the public mainnet for Arc, a Layer 1 blockchain built for payments, trading, and “agentic economic activity,” according to a company announcement on Wednesday. Chief executive Jeremy Allaire called it “the single most significant launch in Circle’s history since USDC itself.”
The network’s founding validators include BlackRock, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered, and ICE among others. The USDC stablecoin, now with around $74 billion in circulation, is wired into Arc as its gas token.
Circle completed the genesis mint of all 10 billion ARC tokens this week, making it the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new Layer 1. However, the company emphasized the mint “is not a commitment to publicly launch ARC,” describing it instead as a technical step toward a potential shift from proof of authority to proof of stake in 2027.
The company had already raised $222 million in an Arc token presale at a $3 billion valuation. BNY, HSBC, and State Street are among the banks with access to the network, while Aave and Morpho anchor lending and Uniswap and Binance provide trading and exchange routes.
Arc supports optional post-quantum signatures, with broader protections in development. The testnet, which launched last year with BlackRock and Visa as participants, processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year.
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