Circle Internet Group

Blockchain · Stablecoins · Fintech Infrastructure

Launch

Circle launches Arc mainnet, validated by BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard

The network's founding validators are all incumbent banks and payment giants, not a single crypto-native firm among them.

• Circle opened the public mainnet of Arc on September 16, 2026, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain that uses USDC as its native gas token instead of a volatile crypto asset.
• Circle is the issuer of USDC, a regulated dollar stablecoin with more than $74 billion in circulation, and Arc is built to natively integrate USDC, EURC and tokenized assets like BlackRock's BUIDL.
• Eleven institutions validate the chain alongside Circle, including BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo and Visa, but the validator set is permissioned, meaning Circle alone decides who can produce blocks.
• Arc runs on a Tendermint-style BFT consensus engine delivering deterministic finality in roughly 350-500 milliseconds, a design that requires a known, bounded validator set rather than open participation.
• Circle completed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens but says that does not commit it to a public token launch; separately, a $222 million sale of ARC tokens at $0.30 apiece valued the network at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation, with BlackRock, a16z and Apollo among buyers.
• More than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders and over 100 applications, including Aave, Uniswap, Morpho and Aerodrome, went live on day one, following an Arc testnet that processed over 700 million transactions in under a year.
• The launch came one day after the US Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act crypto market-structure bill, leaving the regulatory clarity Circle has lobbied for still unresolved.
• By building settlement rails around its own stablecoin and staffing the validator set with banks rather than crypto-native firms, Circle is betting Arc becomes core financial plumbing for institutions and AI agents alike, not just another blockchain.