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Arc, Circle’s open layer 1 blockchain for financial markets and internet-native money movement, is now live on the public mainnet, the company announced Wednesday.
The network launched with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders, more than 100 applications and validators including BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, Visa and other major financial institutions.
Arc is built around several financial-market features, including $USDC-denominated gas fees, sub-second finality and support for tokenized assets and stablecoins. It will support $USDC and EURC alongside tokenized real-world assets, while Circle StableFX provides 24/7 cross-currency settlement and Circle Payments Network is integrated for near-real-time cross-border payments.
Opt-in privacy is also being developed for network-wide deployment, with confidential balances and transactions alongside view-key access.
Arc’s day-one financial ecosystem includes Aero, fomo and Uniswap for trading, as well as USYC, BUIDL, private credit funds and cirBTC for assets that can be traded, lent or used as collateral.
Circle said the combination of a permissioned validator set, institutional participation and its privacy architecture is designed to allow banks, asset managers and enterprises to use a public blockchain for activities such as treasury management, trading and confidential payments.
The network is also designed around AI agents as economic participants. Circle said agents already use its payment infrastructure to execute trades, manage payments, route liquidity and execute contracts, with $USDC accounting for 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume.
Circle Agent Stack provides Agent Wallets, nanopayments through Circle Gateway and an emerging Agent Marketplace, while Arc Portal provides controls for funding wallets, setting spending limits and delegating onchain tasks.
More than 75,000 people are part of the Arc House community and 10,000 are Architect ambassadors, with more than 1,200 projects built on Arc. The testnet processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year. Arc is fully EVM-compatible, and Circle has launched Arc Studio and Arc App Kits to help developers build and deploy stablecoin-native applications.
Circle said Arc’s mainnet launch is the first stage of a roadmap that includes proof of stake, privacy and higher scalability. Planned Network Sectors include dedicated environments for confidential transactions, payments targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second and verifiable agent activity.
Circle also completed the genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens. The company said the mint is a technical milestone rather than a commitment to publicly launch the token, as Arc explores a transition to Proof of Stake in 2027.
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