Circle launches Arc mainnet and mints 10 billion ARC tokens

Circle opened the public mainnet of its Arc Layer 1 blockchain on Wednesday. Circle completed the genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens this week. Circle said the mint was a technical milestone and not a commitment to launch ARC publicly. Circle is exploring a move from proof of authority to proof of stake in 2027. More than 100 applications are available at launch. Over 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are participating. Aave V4, Morpho, and Uniswap are among the protocols available from day one. BlackRock and Visa are among Arc's 11 founding validators. The validators will join the network in phases. Users pay gas fees in USDC on Arc. Arc has sub-second transaction finality. Arc is EVM-compatible, so existing Solidity contracts work on the network. Arc's public testnet launched in October 2025. Circle said the testnet processed more than 700 million transactions in less than a year. Circle and DTCC plan to enable tokenization of DTC-custodied assets on Arc beginning in the second half of 2027. ARC is intended to support network security, utility, and governance. USDC will remain the currency used to pay fees. Circle's payments network and StableFX service are integrated into Arc. StableFX supports round-the-clock currency trading and settlement. Supported stablecoins include USDC, EURC, GBPA, JPYC, and KRW1. BlackRock's BUIDL and Circle's USYC are among the tokenized funds available for trading, lending, and use as collateral. Circle has not yet released its opt-in privacy feature across the network. Circle is working on confidential transactions and balances with view keys for authorized parties. Arc Studio generates smart contracts and application code as an AI coding agent. Arc App Kits is an SDK for payments, swaps, onramps, and yield. Circle is developing AgentVM for AI agents that would work with sensitive data in a protected environment. Circle's roadmap includes a separate payments environment targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second. Arc already supports post-quantum signatures.