Circle has launched the public mainnet of Arc, its open Layer 1 blockchain for financial markets, real-time money movement, and agentic economic activity, capable of sub-second finality.
Arc has native integration into Circle’s full-stack platform, which contains its regulated US dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDC, also used for gas fees.
Founding validators include BlackRock, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay, which will participate in the network’s operation as Circle commences the phased rollout of Arc.
The platform launches with support from various institutions: BitGo’s wallet and custody infrastructure; Chainalysis’s coverage for fungible and non-fungible tokens; Alchemy’s full developer platform; AllUnity’s euro-backed, Swiss franc-pegged, and Swedish krona-anchored stablecoins; and USDC deposits and withdrawals enabled by Kraken.
According to Circle, Arc also contains over 100 applications and institutional and ecosystem builders spanning global banks, asset managers, payment networks, exchanges, custodians, DeFi protocols, wallets, and AI platforms.
Speaking on the launch, Michael Blaugrund, vice president of strategic initiatives at ICE, says: “As a founding validator, ICE is applying our experience securing critical market infrastructure in support of Arc itself, reflecting our clients’ emerging demand for tokenised finance.”
Yoshitaka Kitao, representative director, chairman, president and CEO of SBI Holdings, comments: “With Arc, we will not simply be a user of the network: as a founding validator, we will contribute to its operation and governance.
“SBI Group has also set out the SBI APAC Digital Economic Zone initiative, which endeavours to build the next-generation onchain financial infrastructure and contribute to the development of the APAC region.”
Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave Labs, remarks: “We are doubling down on the Circle ecosystem with a new Aave V4 market on Arc, bringing DeFi’s most trusted credit infrastructure to a network purpose-built to bring real-world finance onchain.”
Merlin Egalite, co-founder of Morpho, adds: “We are excited for Morpho to serve as a credit layer on Arc, bringing open, composable, and capital-efficient lending markets to the network from the start.”
The mainnet features two new tools for the creation of stablecoin-native applications: Arc Studio, an onchain coding agent, and Arc App Kits, a unified SDK for core onchain fund flows.
The tools will support Arc Portal, which lets clients fund agent wallets, set spend limits, and delegate onchain tasks, as three entry points into the blockchain.
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