Circle launches Arc mainnet with BlackRock and Visa among validators

Circle opens the Arc mainnet to the public

Circle has launched the public mainnet of Arc, its own Layer 1 blockchain that anyone can use. More than 100 applications are available from day one, including a new Aave V4 lending market, Morpho and Uniswap, the company said in a statement shared with The Block.

Circle said more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are taking part. A public testnet has been running since October 2025 and processed more than 700 million transactions in less than a year, according to the company.

Key numbers

• 10 billion ARC tokens were minted in the U.S. this week, the full initial supply.
• 11 founding validators were named in August, including BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard and Visa.
• More than 100 apps and over 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are participating at launch.
• 700 million+ transactions were processed on the testnet in under a year.

What Circle and its partners say

CEO Jeremy Allaire called Arc "the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself." He said USDC "was step one" and that Arc is "the network built for what comes next," adding that "the agentic economy and the onchain economy are not two different revolutions; they are the same economy seen from two sides."

Michael Blaugrund, ICE's vice president of strategic initiatives, said his firm's institutional customers had raised concerns about fees and settlement on public blockchains. "Arc's native capabilities, including predictable fees and instant finality, address real friction points these customers raised," he said.

What is confirmed

Circle confirmed the mainnet launch on September 16, 2026, and the completion of the genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens this week. Users pay gas fees, the small charges for processing a transaction, in USDC, and transactions reach finality in under a second. Arc is EVM-compatible, so smart contracts written in Solidity work on the network, and it already supports post-quantum signatures designed to resist future quantum computers.

Circle's payments network and its StableFX service are integrated into Arc. StableFX supports round-the-clock currency trading and settlement in stablecoins including USDC, EURC, GBPA, JPYC and KRW1. BlackRock's BUIDL fund and Circle's USYC are among the tokenized funds that can be traded, lent out or used as collateral. Two developer tools, the Arc Studio AI coding agent and the Arc App Kits software development kit, were released with mainnet.

What is still unclear

Circle said the 10 billion token mint was a technical milestone, not a commitment to launch ARC publicly. The company is exploring a move from proof of authority to proof of stake, two methods for choosing which computers validate transactions, in 2027, but has not decided on it. The network's opt-in privacy feature is not yet live, and AgentVM, a protected environment that would let AI agents handle sensitive data, is still in development. A planned payments environment targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second also remains on the roadmap.

Why it matters

The launch moves Circle beyond issuing USDC into operating its own blockchain network. The presence of BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC and ICE among the founding validators, the entities that confirm transactions, points to established financial institutions using public blockchain infrastructure rather than only private systems. Blaugrund's remarks suggest the network was shaped by demands from those institutions around cost and settlement speed.

What happens next

The 11 founding validators will join the network in phases. Circle and DTCC plan to enable tokenization of DTC-custodied assets on Arc beginning in the second half of 2027. Circle is also working on confidential transactions and balances with view keys for authorized parties, which would let banks, asset managers and enterprises use the public network for treasury, trading and confidential payments.

Sources

• The Block