Circle, the issuer of USDC, has officially rolled out the mainnet for Arc, a layer-1 blockchain designed specifically for stablecoin settlements and financial markets, with a strong focus on agentic transactions.
As detailed in an official Arc blog post on Wednesday, Arc employs USDC for its native gas fees, provides complete Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility, and achieves deterministic finality in under a second.
The ecosystem accommodates more than 20 fiat-backed stablecoins—such as USDC, EURC, JPYC, KRW1, and TRYB—alongside natively supported tokenized assets including BlackRock’s BUIDL and Circle’s USYC. Furthermore, Arc delivers cross-chain connectivity to over 20 distinct blockchain networks via Circle’s Gateway and Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol.
Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Allaire characterized Arc as “the single most significant launch in Circle’s history since USDC itself.” In a separate statement published on X, Circle stated that Arc was engineered for “programmable money, global markets, and agentic economic activity,” defining the network as dedicated infrastructure built for institutional players and developers.
This rollout arrives after the public testnet release of Arc in October 2025, during which Circle reported that upwards of 100 entities were involved, featuring major names like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, and Visa.
In August, Circle disclosed that more than 100 ecosystem creators and institutional participants had tested Arc’s private mainnet prior to the public debut.
Looking ahead, Arc intends to expand decentralization regarding network validation and investigate a potential shift from Proof of Authority to a Proof of Stake model by 2027. Additionally, Circle executed the genesis creation of 10 billion ARC tokens this week, though it clarified that this creation does not guarantee a public token launch.
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Originally published at https://cointelegraph.com/news/circle-arc-mainnet-launch-usdc-native-gas?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound.
