Key highlights:

  • Circle announced the launch of the public mainnet of Arc on Wednesday
  • Founding validators of the Layer 1 blockchain feature BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, among others
  • Transaction fees would be paid in USDC, with a target base fee of $0.01 per transaction

Circle has opened the public mainnet of Arc, a Layer 1 blockchain designed around stablecoin payments, tokenized financial products and transactions carried out by AI agents.

Arc’s validator set features top Wall Street firms

The platform’s founding validators include some of the largest names in finance. BlackRock, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa and Worldpay are all named as validators for Arc.

Circle named the group on August 5 ahead of Wednesday's public launch. The company said over 100 applications, institutional and ecosystem partners, are already live on the network's first day.

The company’s co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said the launch was a major milestone for the company. 

"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."

Arc's testnet, which opened in October 2025, processed more than 700 million transactions across around 3 million wallets before the mainnet launch.

How fees and consensus would be handled

Arc uses USDC as its native gas asset, which means every transaction fee is paid in the stablecoin. The network targets a base fee of $0.01 per transaction, with a cap of 20,000 Gwei. It also uses a fee-smoothing mechanism to limit how much traffic spikes affect costs. 

Furthermore, the network runs on a proof-of-authority consensus model in its permissioned validator set. Circle said the infrastructure could deliver deterministic finality in under one second, with benchmarks showing finality below 350 milliseconds and throughput above 3,000 transactions per second when running with 20 validators. 

It is worth mentioning that Arc's deployment documentation states that developers "can deploy contracts and send transactions without approval.” It, however, has "a fixed group of known, vetted institutions produce and validate blocks." 

Circle said it plans to change the platform’s consensus model from proof-of-authority to proof-of-stake in 2027.

Day-one integrations and a token already in circulation

A range of partners are already live on Arc from launch. On the DeFo side, integrations include Aave, Aerodrome, Morpho and Uniswap, while payment support comes from firms like Rin, Thunes and Wirex. 

Wallet access and custody are supported through platforms such as Binance Wallet, Chainlink, Fireblocks, Kraken, Ledger, MetaMask and Upbit. BlackRock is expected to bring its BUIDL fund on the platform.

DTCC is also set to bring tokenized versions of DTC-custodied assets to the network in the second half of 2027.

Notably, Circle also completed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens this week, calling it a technical milestone rather than an obligation to launch the token publicly. The company previously raised $222 million in a presale at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation in May.

The event was backed by firms like a16z crypto, BlackRock, Apollo Funds, ICE, ARK Invest, among others, many of whom are serving as Arc's founding validators.