Circle Launches Arc Mainnet with BlackRock, DTCC, Visa and Mastercard Among Its Validators

Circle has announced that its Layer 1 blockchain, Arc, is now live on mainnet. The EVM-compatible layer 1 blockchain launches with BlackRock, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp., ICE, Visa, Mastercard, Moneygram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay (now Global Payments) named in its founding validator cohort.

Arc is built for three things: financial markets, real-time money movement and AI agents transacting on their own. Since it is EVM compatible, existing Solidity contracts deploy without rewrite. Circle says that more than 100 applications and over 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are live from day one. This includes banks, asset managers, exchanges, custodians and wallets. Circle stated in its press release that Arc’s testnet, which opened in October last year, processed over 700 million transactions before this week. 

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire even stated that “Arc is the single most significant launch in Circle’s history since USDC itself”. 

Fees are Priced in USDC, Settlement Takes Under a Second

Two choices differentiate Arc from other Layer 1s. The first aspect is gas. Transaction fees on the network are paid in USDC rather than a volatile native token, which means institutions transacting on the chain can forecast what the fees will cost before it sends them. Allair’s comparison was that forcing a company to hold a chain’s token just to use the network is like making Netflix buy Amazon shares to pay its AWS bill. 

Next is settlement. According to Arc’s system overview, the network uses deterministic finality in under one second with no reorganization. Its benchmarks also show finality times below 350 milliseconds and throughput going above 3,000 transactions per second with 20 validators. 

What was Already Running at Block One

Markets did not have to be bootstrapped after the fact. Aave, Morpho and Uniswap are among the protocols available at launch, with Aero, fomo and Uniswap adding trading depth. Collateral comes from Circle’s USYC, BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized by Securitize, and cirBTC, Circle’s institutional bitcoin convertible 1:1 from BTC, cbBTC or wBTC. 

Circle Payments Network and StableFX are integrated into the chain directly. StableFX runs 24/7 currency exchange across more than 20 fully reserved stablecoins, from Brazilian real to Korean won, settling both legs of a trade at once. Binance, Bybit, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, MEXC, OKX, OSL, Bitso, Bitvavo Upbit and Wenia all provide exchange access. 

Circle minted 10 billion ARC tokens 

Circle completed the genesis mint of ARC this week in the U.S., creating the full initial supply of 10 billion tokens and becoming the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new Layer 1. It is not trading and there is no listing date. Allaire stressed the token is not available to the public, and Circle said the mint is not a commitment to launch it. Fees stay in USDC. The chain runs on Proof of Authority, with a move toward Proof of Stake only being explored for 2027. 

That permissioned validator set is what made the institutions comfortable enough to run nodes. It is also what has critics asking whether Arc is a blockchain or a private settlement rail with a public explorer. 

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