Overview
- Circle opened the Arc public testnet on Oct. 28 with over 100 participants, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Visa, Amazon Web Services, Coinbase and Kraken.
- Banks, asset managers and payment networks are testing faster settlement, programmable payments, tokenized funds and on-chain FX for capital-markets and cross-border workflows, with regional stablecoin issuers from Japan, Brazil and Canada joining to trial multi-currency flows.
- The chain is designed as an Economic Operating System for finance, using stablecoins such as USDC to pay network fees and offering predictable dollar-denominated costs, sub-second finality and opt-in privacy.
- A supporting stack is integrating, including wallets like MetaMask and Ledger, developer tooling from Alchemy and Chainlink, and cross-chain connectivity and liquidity via Wormhole, Uniswap, Curve and major exchanges.
- Circle is stewarding Arc initially but says it will transition to distributed, community governance with broader validator participation, and it announced a framework with Clearbank to integrate USDC and EURC across Europe for faster remittances and to explore treasury and tokenized-asset settlement.