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Circle switched on the public mainnet of Arc, its Layer 1 blockchain, on Wednesday, and said it had minted the entire opening supply of 10 billion ARC tokens in the U.S. this week. The company announced the launch with more than 100 applications running and more than 100 institutional and ecosystem partners live from day one.
The founding validator cohort reads like a roll call of traditional finance. BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, ICE, Standard Chartered, Galaxy, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Sumitomo Corporation and Worldpay, now Global Payments, will help secure the network alongside Circle in a phased rollout. BNY, HSBC and State Street are among the banks live on or exploring Arc, while Aave and Morpho anchor its credit markets and Uniswap its trading.
Gas is paid in USDC, which has more than $74 billion in circulation. Settlement is deterministic and final in under a second, Circle said, adding that the validator set is permissioned, and opt-in confidential transactions with view keys are in development for a network-wide release.
A Token With Nowhere to Go
The mint makes Circle “the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new layer-one blockchain,” the company said in its launch release. ARC is meant to serve as a coordination mechanism for security, utility and governance, yet network fees remain payable in USDC and the company said the mint “is not a commitment to publicly launch ARC.” A shift from proof of authority to proof of stake is under exploration for 2027.
Thirteen Months From Blueprint
Circle first said it would build Arc in August 2025, opened a public testnet that October, and put token plans on the record in Seoul in April 2026. The testnet has handled more than 700 million transactions in less than a year, Circle said. The chain is EVM-compatible, so Solidity contracts written elsewhere run on it unchanged.
“Purpose-built blockchains can help accelerate adoption of digital asset use cases, and Arc appears clearly well positioned to serve stablecoin and payment use cases at scale,” said Robbie Mitchnick, BlackRock’s global head of digital assets, in remarks Circle published with the launch.
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Source: unchainedcrypto.com