Circle Opens Arc's Mainnet With USDC as the Network's Gas Token

Circle opened the public mainnet of Arc on Wednesday, a layer 1 blockchain whose transaction fees are paid in USDC instead of a separate volatile coin. Eleven institutions run the founding validator set. Settlement is deterministic and lands in under a second, and the chain is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, so existing Solidity contracts deploy to it unchanged. Circle said more than 100 institutional partners and builders went live on the first day, among them BlackRock, Visa, Binance, Coinbase, Aave and Uniswap. The company had dated the launch for September when it reported second-quarter results.

"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," Jeremy Allaire, Circle's chief executive, said in the launch release.

Who is on the validator list depends on who you read

Circle's own August announcement of the founding cohort names eleven: BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa. The Block's Wednesday account also says eleven, and names five of those. crypto.news gives the same eleven, writing Global Payments as Worldpay. Cointelegraph's Wednesday piece names Goldman Sachs among the validators. Goldman Sachs is on none of the other three lists, Circle's own included, and the accounts do not reconcile. The eleven above are the ones from Circle's release.

Ten billion tokens, none of them public

Circle completed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC this week. The company called it a technical milestone and not a commitment to launch the tokens publicly, in the wording The Block carried on Wednesday, and The Crypto Times reported the same characterisation. Network fees stay payable in USDC. Circle's own launch release does not mention the mint at all. crypto.news alone reports that Circle had agreed to sell 807.5 million ARC to institutional investors at 30 cents each, about $242.2 million in proceeds by the end of June, with lockups running at least a year past any move to proof of stake. No second outlet carried those figures on Wednesday. Circle has said it intends to make that move in 2027.

The count of supported stablecoins is not settled

Cointelegraph puts it above 20 fiat stablecoins and names USDC, EURC, JPYC, KRW1 and TRYB. crypto.news says 22 at launch. The two do not reconcile, and neither outlet says what it counted. The Block describes something narrower again, listing five currencies on StableFX, one of the day-one applications. Tokenized assets are live alongside them: BlackRock's BUIDL, Circle's own USYC, two Janus Henderson funds and cirBTC, a programmable representation of bitcoin. Arc's testnet handled more than 700 million transactions before the switch, which Circle's release places in the chain's first year and The Block places in less than a year.

What has not been switched on

Confidential transactions are described in Circle's release as still in development. The validator set is permissioned and stays that way until the proof-of-stake transition, which has a year attached to it and no date. DTCC's tokenization of the assets it custodies is scheduled for the second half of 2027, four quarters after that. Card networks already settle in stablecoins without Arc, and Visa's $20 billion annual run rate was reported before Arc had a mainnet at all. Whether payment volume moves onto a chain built for it, or stays on the rails it already uses, nothing on Wednesday answered.