Overview
- Circle opened Arc’s public mainnet on Wednesday, rolling out a live Layer‑1 blockchain built for payments, tokenized assets and fast settlement.
- Arc charges fees in USDC and delivers sub‑second deterministic finality so the same dollar balance can pay for transfers and transaction costs.
- More than 100 institutional partners joined at launch, with founding validators that include BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC and major banks operating the permissioned validator set.
- Circle completed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens this week but said the mint is a technical milestone rather than a commitment to a public token sale.
- Day‑one integrations include Circle Payments Network, StableFX for onchain FX, and DeFi and tokenized‑asset projects such as Uniswap, Aave and BlackRock’s BUIDL, and Circle plans broader decentralization, exchange support and privacy sectors on a 2027 roadmap.