Circle's Arc blockchain is live, and BlackRock and Visa are running it
On most blockchains, moving a stablecoin means holding a second one. Send USDC on Ethereum and you need ETH to cover the network fee. Send it on Solana and you need SOL. The system works, and it has for years, but it asks you to keep a volatile token on hand just to move a stable one.
Arc changes that. Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, switched on Arc's public mainnet on September 16, and network fees are paid in USDC itself. One asset, predictable costs, no side token to manage.
That's the feature people will notice first. The more revealing detail is who is running the network.
BlackRock and Visa are producing the blocks
Every blockchain needs computers that check transactions and bundle them into blocks. On Bitcoin, anyone with the right hardware can do that job. On Arc, the list is short and hand-picked.
Circle's 11 founding validators are BlackRock, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, Galaxy, Intercontinental Exchange, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay, now part of Global Payments. Circle makes 12. These are the firms that clear the world's securities trades and run its card networks, and they are not just using Arc; they are operating pieces of it.
Around that core, Circle says more than 100 institutions and companies were live or testing on day one. Banks including HSBC, BNY, State Street, and Societe Generale. Exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and KuCoin. DeFi protocols including Aave, Morpho, and Uniswap. Wallets including MetaMask, Ledger, and Phantom.
CEO Jeremy Allaire called it the most consequential launch in Circle's history, more consequential even than USDC itself. Robbie Mitchnick, who leads digital assets at BlackRock, framed it more modestly, saying purpose-built blockchains can speed up adoption and that Arc looks well positioned for stablecoin and payment uses.
The design choices that matter
Arc is a Layer 1, meaning a base blockchain in its own right rather than an add-on to an existing one. It is also EVM-compatible, so applications written for Ethereum work on Arc without a rewrite. A few things stand out:
- Fees in USDC, so costs are predictable in dollar terms
- Sub-second finality, meaning a transaction is settled and irreversible almost immediately
- Native links to Circle's payments network and its 24/7 currency exchange service, which covers more than 20 local stablecoins
- A home for tokenized real-world assets, including BlackRock's BUIDL treasury fund and Circle's own tokenized money market fund
- Support for post-quantum signatures, a hedge against future computers that could break today's encryption
Circle also aimed Arc squarely at AI agents making payments on their own. That sounds speculative until you look at the number Circle cites: USDC accounts for 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume today. Arc is the first chain designed from the start for software that spends money without a human clicking approve.
One promised feature is not live yet. Opt-in privacy, which would let institutions keep sensitive transactions confidential while remaining auditable, is still in development. For banks weighing treasury or trading use, that absence matters.
About that ARC token
Circle minted 10 billion ARC tokens this week, making it the first publicly traded company to create a native token for a new Layer 1 blockchain.
Worth reading the fine print, because this is where coverage gets sloppy. Circle explicitly said the mint is not a commitment to launch ARC publicly. Network fees stay payable in USDC. The token is tied to a possible future shift in how Arc reaches consensus, from the current permissioned setup to proof of stake, which Circle says it may explore in 2027.
So the tokens exist. There is no confirmed public sale, no listing, and no date.
What it means for USDC
This is the part that matters most if you hold USDC, and it cuts two ways.
The structural case is straightforward. Every single transaction on Arc consumes USDC as gas. If Arc attracts real volume, that creates demand for USDC tied to the network simply functioning, rather than to trading or speculation. Circle spent years getting USDC onto other people's blockchains. Arc is the first one where USDC is the fuel rather than a passenger.
Circle needs that. USDC has more than $74 billion in circulation and its on-chain transaction volume grew 151% year over year in the second quarter, but supply has slipped from above $80 billion earlier in 2026. More to the point, reserve income, the interest Circle earns on the safe assets backing USDC, made up roughly 95% of its $701 million in second-quarter revenue. That's a business highly exposed to interest rates falling and to USDC supply shrinking. Arc is Circle's attempt to earn money from infrastructure instead of interest.
The competition explains the urgency. A group of 21 financial institutions including Bank of America, Citi, and Goldman Sachs is preparing its own dollar stablecoin for 2027. Stripe is pushing its own chain, Tempo, alongside a planned stablecoin. Tether's USDT remains larger than USDC. Circle is trying to make itself the rails rather than just one of several dollar tokens riding on someone else's.
Markets have not rewarded it yet. Circle's stock closed at $86.30 the session before the launch, down about 11% that day and roughly 36% over the past year.
The criticism is not unreasonable
Plenty of people in crypto look at Arc and see something other than a blockchain.
Adam Cochran of Cinneamhain Ventures called it a consortium chain of pre-approved private validators, noting they can reverse transactions through dispute protocols, and argued that using USDC for fees removes the economic reason validators would stay honest without a closed membership list. His sharper point: the industry was built to remove trusted middlemen, not to assemble new ones. Kevin Lehtiniitty of Borderless.xyz argued another centralized chain mostly fragments liquidity.
The practical concern is concentration. A dozen identifiable validators can be subpoenaed, pressured, or coordinated in ways thousands of anonymous ones cannot, and USDC has frozen addresses at law enforcement request before. Circle picks the validators, and that selection is a corporate decision rather than something enforced by code.
Circle's answer is that its target customers want exactly this. A bank needs to know who is validating its transactions and who to call when something breaks. Nic Puckrin of Coin Bureau made the same point from the other direction: the validator list is precisely what gives Arc credibility with institutions.
Both things are true. Arc trades censorship resistance for institutional comfort, on purpose.
The timing is hard to ignore
Arc went live one day after the US Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, the bill that would have set federal rules dividing crypto oversight between the SEC and CFTC. The cloture vote fell short of the 60 votes needed, effectively ending the effort for 2026.
So Arc arrives into a gap. Stablecoins themselves have a federal framework under the GENIUS Act, which Circle cites directly, but the broader market structure rules do not exist. Circle's own disclaimer is blunt about the consequence: Arc has not been reviewed or approved by the New York Department of Financial Services or any other regulator.
What to watch next
Launch-day partner lists are the easiest thing in crypto to assemble and the least predictive. The signals worth tracking are narrower:
- Whether transaction volume and fee revenue show up in Circle's next earnings report
- Whether the privacy feature ships, since several of the banks on the list need it before doing real business
- Whether BlackRock's BUIDL fund and the DTCC integration actually deploy, both of which sit on later timelines rather than being live now
- Whether the proof of stake transition happens in 2027, and what that does to the ARC token question
Arc's testnet processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year, which suggests the technology works. Whether the world's largest financial institutions move meaningful money across it is a different question, and one that will take quarters to answer.
Get USDC on mb.io
USDC sits at the center of all of this, and holding it is where participation starts. mb.io, the regulated spot crypto exchange backed by MultiBank Group, gives you direct access to USDC and USDT alongside a wide range of cryptocurrencies, with assets held under institutional-grade MPC custody and regulatory oversight from VARA in the UAE and AUSTRAC in Australia.
