- Circle opened the public mainnet of Arc.
- BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard and DTCC sit among the founding validators.
- Circle minted 10 billion ARC tokens for governance and future security.
- The launch arrived one day after the Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act.
Circle Internet Group has opened the public mainnet of Arc, a Layer-1 blockchain the company built specifically for stablecoin settlement, moving USDC from a token that rides across other people’s networks to the native asset of a chain Circle controls. The network went live with more than 100 applications and a founding validator set that includes BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. CEO Jeremy Allaire called it the most significant launch in the company’s history since USDC itself. Circle is positioning Arc as an operating layer for moving money, with payments, foreign exchange and tokenized assets settling on the same chain.
Arc reached production one day after the U.S. Senate failed a cloture vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, and the sequencing captures the central tension around Circle right now, where the settlement infrastructure is running well ahead of the federal rules that would let it scale into the banking system.
USDC pays the gas so companies never hold a volatile token
On Ethereum or Solana, anyone who wants to transact has to hold the chain’s own volatile asset to pay for gas. Arc removes that requirement and charges fees directly in USDC. For a corporate treasury or a payments processor, the practical effect is a settlement cost denominated in dollars, with no exposure to a token that can swing 20% between the moment an invoice is raised and the moment it clears. That single design decision is what makes Arc legible to a corporate finance department, where predictable costs matter more than speculative upside. It also explains why ARC, the network’s own token, does not touch the fee market at all.
Circle completed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC. There is no retail sale attached to the launch. The token is structured for governance and, eventually, network security, with Circle targeting a move from the current permissioned model to Proof-of-Stake in 2027. Worth keeping straight for readers who assume every new chain ships a tradable coin: ARC already had institutional holders before mainnet through the $222 million presale that valued the network near $3 billion, so what has not happened is broad public distribution.
DTCC and ICE now help produce blocks on Circle’s chain
Arc runs on Proof-of-Authority, meaning a fixed set of named, vetted institutions produce and confirm blocks rather than an open field of anonymous nodes. That choice trades some decentralization for accountability, which is exactly the trade regulated financial firms tend to want. The founding cohort joining in phases includes BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, Intercontinental Exchange, Galaxy Digital, Standard Chartered, MoneyGram, Worldpay, SBI Group and Sumitomo Corporation, and the weight of that list sits in its least crypto-native names. DTCC clears the bulk of U.S. securities transactions, and ICE owns the New York Stock Exchange, so their role as validators puts the settlement plumbing of traditional markets directly onto Circle’s chain.
BlackRock’s involvement runs deeper than validation. Its BUIDL fund, holding roughly $2.7 billion in tokenized U.S. Treasury exposure, deploys natively on Arc alongside Circle’s own USYC. The chain also ships with Circle StableFX, a request-for-quote engine for round-the-clock cross-currency settlement across more than 20 fiat stablecoins including USDC, EURC, JPYC and KRW1.
USDC already settles 98.8% of AI-agent payments
Circle is making an explicit bet on machine-driven payments. It describes Arc as the first Layer-1 designed from genesis for AI agents that execute economic tasks, and it has data to point at: since the Circle Agent Stack launched in May 2026, USDC has settled 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume moving over the x402 standard. Arc supports this with an execution environment called AgentVM for handling sensitive data, and an Arc Portal where an operator can set spending limits and delegate on-chain tasks to an agent. Developers get Arc Studio, an on-chain coding assistant, and a unified SDK for payments, swaps and yield. Whether autonomous agent payments become a large market is unproven, though Circle is wiring the capability in before the demand fully exists.
A 50-49 Senate vote reset Circle’s regulatory clock
On September 15, the Senate came up short on a 50-49 procedural vote to advance the Clarity Act, and Circle shares fell 11% to $86. The bill matters to Circle for a specific reason. Passage would set federal ground rules for stablecoins and remove what the company calls a dual compliance burden, the overlapping state and federal obligations it currently manages. Clear federal law would also open direct distribution arrangements with mainstream banking networks, the kind of pipes that turn USDC from a crypto-native instrument into a default settlement rail. The vote’s failure does not block Arc technically, though it delays the regulatory certainty that would let the network’s institutional validators lean into it at full weight.
USDC crossed $100 trillion in cumulative on-chain volume and now sits near $74.5 billion in circulation, backed one-to-one by cash and short-term Treasuries in the Circle Reserve Fund, and its transactional behavior looks nothing like the larger USDT.
A dollar of USDC turns over 741 times a year against 74 times for USDT, which marks USDC as the more active settlement asset. USDT still leads on raw exchange trading and total transaction count, so the split is less about which token is bigger and more about what each one is used for. Arc is Circle’s attempt to capture the high-value settlement flow on infrastructure it owns end to end.
Noble’s shutdown and the Tazapay deal redraw USDC’s footprint
The clearest near-term consequence is a consolidation of Circle’s own liquidity. The company is ending USDC support on the Cosmos-based Noble chain, halting new minting there on October 13, 2026 and pausing smart contracts and routing by January 12, 2027, which forces roughly $92 million in Noble USDC to migrate toward its newer Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol V2. On the distribution side, Circle’s pending acquisition of Singapore-based Tazapay, expected to close by 2027, would push USDC settlement into 60+ banking and fintech partners across 100+ payout markets, and its Nubank partnership opens USDC and EURC access to 140 million customers in Latin America. Consumer platforms are lining up too. Robinhood said it will support Arc so users can deposit and withdraw USDC directly on the network, one of more than 190 partners Circle listed as building on the chain at launch.
Another way to move your digital dollars.
Robinhood will soon support @Arc, an L1 built by @Circle, so you can deposit and withdraw USDC right on the network where supported. https://t.co/gBZXvl7Zqu
— Robinhood (@RobinhoodApp) September 16, 2026
The competitive field is already crowded, with Stripe and Paradigm’s Tempo, Google Cloud’s Universal Ledger and Coinbase’s Base all chasing the same institutional settlement layer, and the Clarity Act’s stalled path in the Senate means the firm that wins that race may be decided as much in committee rooms as on any testnet.