How Pulsar Is Building a Cross-Border Money Experience With Arc

Cross-border payments on most rails frustrate users with settlement delays, high fees, and failed international transactions.

A local card may fail to purchase an international subscription. Money sent home often faces settlement delays, substantial fees, and currency conversion costs. Holding multiple currencies (like dollars and euros, for example) can mean separate accounts, apps, and conversion steps.

Pulsar is building with those user concerns in mind, and its infrastructure choices on Arc illustrate what stablecoin-native consumer apps can look like at scale. Pulse Money, its upcoming consumer money app, uses stablecoins beneath a familiar financial user interface (UI) with the goal of helping people hold, convert, transfer, and spend across currencies without managing the blockchain mechanics themselves.

During the Pulsar Arc Builder Spotlight, its CEO and Cofounder Alex Radu presented the first public demo of the app and explained why his team chose Arc. Pulsar outlined an ambitious product: one non-custodial app for dollar-, euro-, and pound-denominated value, bank and stablecoin transfers, currency swaps, card spending, savings, investing, and emerging agentic features.

The product is still in development, but the use cases are already concrete. Pulsar is offering USD and EUR account flows; 1:1 funding with USDC,¹ EURC,² and other stablecoins with no funding fee; and a virtual card for international spending, payments, and subscriptions.

Turning stablecoins into an everyday money experience

Pulsar starts with a simple product principle: users should see a balance and the actions they want to take, not the underlying infrastructure required to complete them. Arc’s settlement architecture is what makes this design choice possible.

A person can fund the app with stablecoins or fiat currency, convert between supported currencies, send a bank or stablecoin transfer, or pay with a card. Under the UI, Pulsar plans to route those actions through a non-custodial account. When a cardholder pays a merchant, Pulsar’s app draws from the user’s balance and settles in the currency used for the purchase. The company also plans to support direct settlement with USDC¹ and EURC,² which would let supported dollar and euro flows settle in their corresponding currencies rather than automatically routing everything through dollars.

This app design demonstrates that a multi-currency consumer product can hide chain selection, gas management, and routing entirely while still supporting non-custodial accounts and crosschain stablecoin inflows — because Arc supports relevant onchain operations at the infrastructure level.

Pulsar is available in 76 countries, with its card expected to work in more than 195 countries where the relevant Visa program is accepted. That coverage is a signal for builders: a stablecoin-native consumer app on Arc can target genuinely global distribution from the start.

Why Arc fits a multi-currency money app

While a consumer-facing product, Pulsar’s infrastructure requirements are demanding. Pulsar Money needs to coordinate stablecoin balances, currency conversion, card and bank rails, non-custodial accounts, and transactions that may begin on other blockchains. Arc combines those pieces within a stablecoin-native environment.

USDC-based fees make the network payment model predictable

Arc uses USDC for transaction fees. Pulsar’s developers can therefore design around a fee asset designed to be stable, not volatile, for transaction fees. For an app trying to make blockchain operations disappear inside the UI, one less asset to acquire and explain is a meaningful improvement.

Deterministic finality supports clear payment states

Arc transactions reach deterministic finality in under a second. For the onchain leg of a transfer, swap, or funding flow, that gives the application a quick answer on whether a transaction is final or not. This reduces pending states and helps Pulsar present transaction confirmations that feel closer to the financial apps consumers already know, use, and understand.

StableFX enables the products Pulsar wants to build

Pulsar plans to integrate StableFX as it develops its in-app currency conversion experience. Arc supports onchain FX between stablecoins with programmable execution, payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement, and predictable fees. That architecture aligns with Pulsar’s goal of letting a customer move between currencies from one balance while liquidity and settlement remain behind the UI.

Circle infrastructure provides a connected foundation

Arc connects directly with Circle infrastructure, including USDC¹, EURC², CCTP, and developer tools for moving stablecoins across supported networks. Pulsar wants users to bring stablecoins from multiple chains into the app without worrying about bridges or gas fees. Building on Arc gives the Pulsar team a common settlement environment for those flows while it shapes the consumer experience.

For Pulsar, building on Circle's infrastructure has made conversations with licensed financial partners easier — credibility they say would have taken longer to establish independently, given Circle's standing as the issuer of the world's largest regulated dollar stablecoin.

What Pulsar’s work shows other builders

Pulsar is an example of what happens when stablecoins become a product ingredient instead of the product interface. The user does not need to start with a chain, a bridge, or a gas token. They typically start with a practical payment goal like fund an account, exchange currencies, or send or receive money. Pulsar's design handles everything else automatically, routing the action through the right stablecoin and settlement path beneath the UI.

That's achievable on Arc because the network provides deterministic finality, stablecoins as gas, onchain FX, and direct Circle infrastructure integration — all in one environment. Developers building consumer apps may reduce the need to stitch those together across separate protocols.

Pulsar is also building toward savings, investing, privacy, and agentic features that could let users automate purchases or financial actions within explicit controls. These capabilities are still on the roadmap, and they explain why the team chose infrastructure designed for more than basic value transfer. For Arc builders, it's a demonstration that stablecoin-native infrastructure can support a product surface well beyond payments.

The differentiator, in the end, is not that a payment happens onchain. It's the set of familiar financial actions that can sit in one UI because settlement happens beneath it.

Build on Arc mainnet, live now

Arc public mainnet went live on September 16, 2026, with 11 founding validators including BlackRock, Visa, and Mastercard. What Pulsar demoed in development is now running in production.

Pulsar is currently live on Arc mainnet and onboarding users from their waitlist. Its Arc Builder Spotlight includes the product walkthrough, the team’s reasoning for choosing Arc, and a closer look at the card, settlement, and agentic features on its roadmap.

To learn more, Pulsar's Arc Builder Spotlight has the product walkthrough, the team's reasoning for choosing Arc, and a look at the card, settlement, and agentic features on its roadmap. To try the app, go here.

If you're building on Arc, start with the Arc docs and join the Arc Discord.

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