Circle Internet Group, Inc. (NYSE:CRCL) today announced the public mainnet launch of Arc, an open Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for financial markets, real-time money movement, and agentic economic activity.

Arc launches with native integration into Circle’s full-stack platform; a founding validator cohort drawn from the institutions that run global finance; more than 100 applications; and more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders spanning global banks, asset managers, payment networks, exchanges, custodians, DeFi protocols, wallets, and AI platforms live on day one.

“Arc is the single most significant launch in Circle’s history since USDC itself, and it is the embodiment of the premise we have operated on for thirteen years: money should work the way the internet works,” said Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Circle.

“USDC was step one. Arc is the network built for what comes next. The agentic economy and the onchain economy are not two different revolutions; they are the same economy seen from two sides, and both need infrastructure that never closes, settles in under a second, and is trusted by the institutions that anchor the global financial system. Today we are switching on something the world has never had before: an open, neutral, always-on economic operating system for the internet, secured by some of the most important financial institutions on Earth, and built for a world where both people and machines transact.”

Six design choices set Arc apart and power onchain finance across payments, FX, trading, lending, markets, and asset issuance:

• Gas in dollars. Fees are paid in USDC, with no volatile native token required.
• Sub-second finality. Deterministic, instant settlement. Final means final.
• Opt-in privacy. Confidential transactions and balances with view keys; in development for network-wide release.
• Issuers and interoperability. A home for USDC, EURC, and tokenized real-world assets, with Circle StableFX providing 24/7 cross-currency settlement.
• Agentic economic activity. The first blockchain designed from genesis for AI agents as economic actors.
• Institutional security. Post-quantum signatures supported today and deterministic consensus built to financial market standards.

Along with Circle, Arc will have a phased rollout from the founding validator cohort that includes BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay (now Global Payments). The institutions that clear the world’s securities, run its payment rails, and manage its capital are not simply connecting to Arc; they will participate in the operation of the network itself, securing a public blockchain built to meet institutional needs.

Around the validator core, more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are already live on or exploring Arc’s private mainnet ahead of today’s public launch, including:

• Global banks: BNY, BTG Pactual, HSBC, Lead Bank, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered, and State Street have access to a public blockchain designed to help meet bank regulatory demands, including a permissioned validator model and defined governance perimeter.
• Asset managers and real-world asset (RWA) issuers: Bitwise, BlackRock, Dinari, Janus Henderson, New York Life Investment Management in partnership with Centrifuge, Maple, Matrixdock, ProShares, and xStocks by Payward are working to bring tokenized financial products onchain.
• Global payments firms: Digital Garage, Global Payments, JCB, Mastercard, MoneyGram, Thunes, and Visa will be enabling internet-scale settlement with stablecoins and building always-on and AI-powered global payments.
• Digital asset exchanges: Binance, Bitso, Bitvavo, Bybit, Coinbase, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, MEXC, OKX, OSL, Upbit, and Wenia give users and institutions familiar, seamless access into Arc.
• Custody providers: Anchorage, BitGo, Ceffu, Copper, Fireblocks, and Zodia Custody deliver secure, institutional-grade custody for digital assets on Arc.
• Onchain trading and liquidity protocols: 1inch, Aero, Bankr, Dinari, Doppler, edgeX, Extended, fomo, Hibachi, LI.FI, o1.exchange, pools.trade, Pump.fun, Robinhood, and Uniswap expand access across spot trading, structured products, perpetuals, and crosschain execution in markets that never close.
• Borrow, lend, and earn: Aave and Morpho anchor Arc’s onchain credit markets at launch, with Bitwise, Cumberland, Dialectic, Galaxy, Gauntlet, Keyrock, and Steakhouse Financial supporting the ecosystem in different capacities including through curated vault strategies, risk oversight, and the supply of USDC and EURC for borrowing and lending.
• Digital wallets: Binance Wallet, Bitget Wallet, Gate Web3, Kucoin Web3, Ledger, MetaMask, OKX Wallet, Phantom, Rainbow, and Trust Wallet put Arc’s markets within reach of hundreds of millions of existing users from day one.
• Ecosystem infrastructure and tooling: Alchemy, BCW, Blockdaemon, Chainlink, Figment, Kaleido, and Quicknode power the developer and infrastructure layer supporting builders on Arc.
• Building the agentic economy and the infrastructure to support it: Alethieum, Architect, Arrays, BlockRun, Goldsky, Kite AI, Ornn, Orthogonal, and Virtuals.

Arc’s global developer community includes more than 75,000 active Arc House members and 10,000 Architect ambassadors, who have built more than 1,200 projects on Arc. Its testnet processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year, and Arc is fully EVM-compatible, so existing Solidity contracts and developer tools work on day one.

With mainnet, Circle is releasing two new tools for builders to create stablecoin-native applications without starting from scratch:

• Arc Studio is an onchain coding agent that takes ideas to implementation faster, generating an application complete with smart contracts, application logic, and deployment-ready code for the network.
• Arc App Kits is a unified SDK for core onchain fund flows, letting developers add payments, swaps, onramps, and yield in a few lines of code.

Together with Arc Portal, users, builders, and enterprises have three access points into Arc.