Circle launches Arc mainnet with BlackRock, Visa and other founding validators

Arc opens with a TradFi validator cohort

Circle switched Arc on as a public Layer 1 on Wednesday, with block production handed to a permissioned set of regulated financial institutions rather than an open validator market. The founding cohort comprises BlackRock, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa and Worldpay alongside Circle; Circle named the group on Aug. 5, and Global Payments completed its $24.25 billion acquisition of Worldpay in January. Circle said more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are live at launch, framing Arc as the most institutionally endorsed new Layer 1 to date.

USDC-denominated fees and proof-of-authority consensus

Arc runs as an EVM-compatible chain that charges gas in USDC at 18 decimals, eliminating a volatile native gas token and tying transaction costs to a regulated stablecoin. Circle's documentation targets a base fee of about $0.01 per transaction capped at 20,000 Gwei under an EIP-1559 design with exponentially weighted moving-average smoothing, and the landing page lists average weekly transaction cost at $0.045. Consensus is proof-of-authority via Circle's Malachite Tendermint BFT implementation across roughly 20 SOC 2-certified operators, with system benchmarks citing deterministic finality under one second, below 350 milliseconds in practice and throughput above 3,000 transactions per second.

Stablecoin rails, tokenized assets and an AI-agent stack

Circle positioned Arc as infrastructure for tokenized money movement rather than a general-purpose smart contract chain, supporting USDC and EURC alongside tokenized real-world assets and integrating Circle StableFX for 24/7 cross-currency settlement and Circle Payments Network for near-real-time cross-border payments. More than 100 applications are live on day one, with Aave, Morpho and Uniswap anchoring DeFi alongside Aero Lite, fomo, USYC, BUIDL, private credit funds and cirBTC for trading, lending and collateral. Circle said USDC accounts for 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume, with Agent Wallets, Circle Gateway nanopayments, an Agent Marketplace and Arc Portal controls extending the chain to AI agents as economic participants.

Genesis mint and a staged roadmap

Circle completed the genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens but stressed the step is a technical milestone rather than a commitment to a public token launch, leaving an ARC distribution as a market watch item alongside validators' willingness to route real settlement volume through Arc. The mainnet launch opens a roadmap that includes dedicated Network Sectors for confidential transactions, payments targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second and verifiable agent activity, with Arc exploring a transition to proof-of-stake in 2027. Circle separately launched Arc Studio and Arc App Kits to support developer deployment of stablecoin-native applications.

Testnet track record and developer community

Arc's testnet, which opened in October 2025, processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year, providing the on-chain footprint behind Wednesday's mainnet debut. The Arc House developer community counts more than 75,000 members, 10,000 Architect ambassadors and more than 1,200 projects built on Arc. Circle co-founder, chairman and chief executive Jeremy Allaire called the launch "the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself," underscoring the strategic weight Circle is placing on the new chain.