Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) launched the public mainnet of Arc on September 16, 2026, a Layer 1 blockchain built for institutional finance. More than 100 institutional builders went live on day one, including BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, and DTCC.
The Big Picture
- Circle switched on Arc’s public mainnet with a founding validator cohort of eleven institutions, including BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay.
- The network settles transactions in under one second and charges gas fees in USDC instead of a volatile native token.
- Circle minted the full 10 billion token supply of ARC this week as a genesis event, without committing to a public token launch.
- USDC, which backs Arc’s fee model, has more than $74 billion in circulation according to Circle.
- Aave and Morpho are anchoring Arc’s onchain lending markets at launch, alongside trading venues Aerodrome, fomo, and Uniswap.
Circle switches on Arc mainnet
Circle built Arc as an open Layer 1 network purpose-built for financial markets, real-time money movement, and what the company calls agentic economic activity, according to its September 16 pressroom announcement. The network integrates natively with Circle’s existing platform, including USDC and the company’s cross-border settlement tools.
Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s co-founder, chairman, and CEO, said in the announcement:
Arc departs from typical Layer 1 design in a handful of specific ways. Gas fees run in USDC rather than a native token. Transactions reach deterministic, sub-second finality. The network supports opt-in privacy through confidential transactions and view keys, a feature still in development for full network release. Circle also built in post-quantum signature support at launch, ahead of broader post-quantum protections still in progress.
Arc Mainnet is live.
— Circle (@circle) September 16, 2026
Built for programmable money, global markets, and agentic economic activity, Arc brings stablecoin-native infrastructure to builders and institutions from day one.
Explore what’s live on Arc: https://t.co/2dpsrq6vW3 pic.twitter.com/KzWq7sM8Bg
Founding validators help run the network itself
Circle’s founding validator cohort, announced ahead of the mainnet launch, includes BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay. These institutions clear securities, run payment rails, and manage capital for much of the global financial system, and Circle says they will help operate Arc, securing the network alongside using it.
Michael Blaugrund, ICE’s vice president of strategic initiatives said:
Beyond the validator cohort, more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are live on or exploring Arc’s mainnet, spanning global banks (BNY, HSBC, Societe Generale, State Street), asset managers and tokenized-asset issuers (Bitwise, BlackRock, Janus Henderson), payment networks (JCB, MoneyGram, Thunes, Visa), and digital asset exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX). Aave and Morpho anchor Arc’s onchain credit markets at launch, with Aerodrome, fomo, and Uniswap handling day-one trading infrastructure.
Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave Labs said:
ARC token mint precedes any public launch
Circle completed the genesis mint of the ARC token this week in the United States, creating the network’s full initial supply of 10 billion tokens. The company describes ARC as a digital commodity meant to coordinate security, utility, and governance on Arc once the network moves toward proof of stake, a transition it is targeting for 2027. Network fees stay payable in USDC regardless of that shift.
Circle was explicit that the genesis mint is a technical milestone, not a decision to bring ARC to public markets. The token is not available to the public, and Circle has made no commitment on when or whether that will change.
Why It Matters?
Arc’s design puts Circle’s institutional relationships to work as network infrastructure, not just as customers layered on top of it. Running gas fees in USDC instead of a volatile token removes a common objection banks raise about public blockchains, and pairing that with sub-second finality and a permissioned validator set gives compliance teams a settlement layer that behaves more like existing market infrastructure than a typical crypto network. The validator list itself, drawn from firms that already clear trades and move money at scale, signals that Circle built Arc around the operational habits of regulated finance.
The bigger open question is what happens to ARC once Circle moves toward proof of stake in 2027. A genesis mint of the full 10 billion token supply, without a public launch commitment, leaves the token’s eventual role in security and governance unresolved even as the underlying network is already live with real institutional volume. How Circle sequences that transition, and whether USDC remains the only way to pay for network activity once ARC has a public market, will shape how much of Arc’s institutional appeal survives the shift.
