Circle just launched its own blockchain — and Wall Street is running it

Circle now owns the road its stablecoin drives on.

The USDC issuer switched on the public mainnet of Arc, its Layer 1 blockchain built for payments, trading, and AI-driven "agentic" economic activity, on Wednesday. More than 100 applications are available at launch — including Aave V4's lending market, Morpho, and Uniswap — with over 100 institutional and ecosystem builders participating.

The headline move: Wall Street as validators

Instead of the usual permissionless validator set, Arc is secured by the institutions building on it. BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, and Visa are among the 11 founding validators named in August, alongside Galaxy, Global Payments, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, and Sumitomo, joining the network in phases. Binance, Kraken, Bybit, and OKX provide on-ramps, with Coinbase to follow.

Circle presents the permissioned model as a selling point: a "defined governance perimeter" that lets banks use a public chain for treasury, trading, and confidential payments. ICE's Michael Blaugrund said its institutional customers had raised issues around fees and settlement onchain, and "Arc's native capabilities, including predictable fees and instant finality, address real friction points."

USDC is the gas. ARC is the... TBD.

Users pay gas fees in USDC — not in a new token — with sub-second finality on an EVM-compatible network. But Circle did mint 10 billion ARC tokens in the U.S. this week, making it the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new Layer 1. The company was quick to stress the mint "is not a commitment to publicly launch ARC," describing it as a technical step toward a possible move from proof of authority to proof of stake in 2027.

CEO Jeremy Allaire called Arc "the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself," saying the chain is built for an economy where agents and humans transact alike — citing Dune data that USDC accounts for 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume.

The numbers behind the bet

Arc's public testnet launched in October 2025 and processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year. Circle had already raised $222 million in an Arc token presale at a $3 billion valuation. The chain supports more than 20 fiat stablecoins — USDC, EURC, GBPA, JPYC, KRW1, and others — and tokenized assets including BlackRock's BUIDL fund and Circle's USYC are available natively.

Circle and DTCC also plan to enable tokenization of DTC-custodied assets on Arc beginning in the second half of 2027 — arguably the biggest prize of all. The roadmap includes a payments environment targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second, opt-in privacy with view keys for authorized parties, and broader post-quantum protections.

The timing isn't lost on anyone: Arc launches the day after Congress failed to give crypto its market-structure rulebook. Wall Street, it seems, isn't waiting.

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