Arc Mainnet Is Live: The Economic OS for the Internet

Arc Mainnet, an open internet platform for the world’s financial markets, real-time value movement, and agentic economic activity, is now live.

From day one, Arc launches as a full-stack platform. At the base is an open Layer-1 network with institutional validators, USDC as native gas, and interoperability with 20+ blockchains through Circle CCTP and Gateway. On top of it: developer tooling, Circle Agent Stack for policy-controlled agent wallets, local fiat stablecoins, tokenized funds, and programmable wrapped bitcoin. Because these pieces already work together, anything built on Arc inherits the whole stack: assets that are already liquid, markets that are already open, costs that don't move, and settlement that's final in under a second.

The next era of internet finance will be shaped by the convergence of programmable money, tokenized assets, always-on markets, and autonomous software. Each is powerful on its own; together they need somewhere to meet. Stablecoins created a new transactional layer for the internet, and Arc extends it into a coordination layer where value can be issued, exchanged, collateralized, and settled by anyone, or anything, at any hour. That makes new things possible: an asset can become available worldwide the moment it's issued, a payment and its currency conversion can settle as a single action, and software can transact on its own behalf.

The internet needs an operating system for the full spectrum of economic activity.

Arc, the Economic OS for the internet, is live.

A complete AI-ready financial platform at genesis

If the financial system were designed today, it would not run on batch settlement, banking hours, and chains of correspondent banks. It would work the way the internet works: open, programmable, instant, and global. Over the past decade, stablecoins and onchain finance have proven that money can move this way, yet fragmentation, compliance concerns, and technical complexity have kept those benefits out of reach for most institutions, businesses, and people. Arc is built to close that gap. It brings together in one platform the settlement network, the assets and liquidity, the interoperability, the compliance and privacy design, and the developer and AI tooling required to run financial and agentic applications at internet scale.

At the foundation of the Arc platform is Arc Network: an open Layer-1 blockchain with low and predictable stablecoin fees, deterministic sub-second settlement finality, EVM compatibility, and a security architecture built for long-term resilience, including optional post-quantum signatures. Arc Network is the enterprise-grade settlement layer for today’s financial markets and the growing agentic economy now taking shape.

But, Arc is more than just a blockchain network. It also comes with a new set of tools and services to help builders and users engage with the ecosystem:

• Arc Studio is an onchain coding agent that helps builders create applications with natural language. Anyone with an idea can describe what they want to build, generate working prototypes with frontend, backend, and smart contract infrastructure, and deploy directly to Arc. From wallets and settlement logic to automated treasury workflows, escrow systems, and conditional payments, Studio helps teams leverage AI to cut the time from inspiration to a working build from weeks to minutes.
• Arc App Kits enable stablecoin-powered apps with curated SDKs that simplify onchain development. Instead of stitching together custom integrations across wallets, protocols, and liquidity providers, developers can use App Kits to add core financial functionality directly into their apps. Today, Onramp Kit and Earn Kit join the App Kits suite. Onramp Kit lets developers embed fiat-to-USDC funding flows with familiar payment methods like Apple Pay and debit cards, with built-in identity verification. Earn Kit lets developers offer in-app earn opportunities through lending protocols like Morpho, while keeping the full user experience inside their application.
• Arc Portal gives users a unified entry point into the Arc ecosystem, making it easy to set up and fund wallets for users and agents; swap assets; discover a wide range of apps; track balances and activity from a single place; and access earn, borrow, and lend opportunities. Users can create agent wallets directly in Arc Portal, set spend limits and permissions, and put agents to work on approved financial tasks with visibility and control.

Arc also integrates deeply with Circle’s existing platform services:

• Circle Agent Stack gives every builder on Arc the infrastructure to deploy policy-controlled agent wallets, execute sub-cent USDC nanopayments, and support agentic economic activity from day one. An agent hiring three other agents, paying them in under a second, and earning a fraction of a cent for its own work is no longer science fiction. It’s possible on Arc today. Early services using Agent Stack to bring agents to Arc include: Alethieum, Architect, Arrays, BlockRun, Goldsky, Kite AI, Ornn, Orthogonal, and Virtuals.
• Circle Digital Assets, including USDC, EURC, cirBTC, and USYC, gives businesses, developers, and institutions trusted, programmable, and highly liquid building blocks to move, store, and exchange value on Arc.
• Circle CCTP and Circle Gateway extend Arc across the multichain ecosystem, enabling seamless value exchange, liquidity access, asset issuance, and composability across 20+ supported blockchains. With new CCTP lock-and-mint and burn-and-mint infrastructure, developers can permissionlessly issue assets on Arc and other supported blockchains, making more assets available to their users.
• Circle Payments Network and Circle StableFX bring global payments and FX capabilities to Arc, helping businesses and institutions move and exchange value across borders and currencies with greater speed, efficiency, and reach.

Portal already lets users spin up agent wallets with spend limits; Agent Stack already lets those agents transact in fractions of a cent. That's the leading edge of a bigger shift: AI agents are moving from tools people operate to labor people delegate, and every one of those agents needs to transact. Machines don't tolerate two-day settlement or banking hours; as billions of agents begin doing economic work around the clock, the velocity of money will rise by orders of magnitude. When intelligence is abundant, trust becomes the bottleneck, which is part of why Arc was built for agents as economic actors from genesis, not bolted on after the fact.

That same logic extends past payments and into provenance. For agents to act as trusted autonomous workers, businesses need to know which registered agent performed the work, what code, model, policy, and tools ran, and whether the evidence can be independently verified. The Arc platform is designed to provide that open trust layer: user keys delegate scoped authority to an agent; Arc Studio converts requests into typed mandates a user reviews; Agent Accounts register agents, publishers, versions, and attestations; and execution proofs commit tamper-proof evidence records to Arc.

Institutional trust meets open innovation

Institutions bring trust and liquidity, developers bring innovation, and agents bring velocity — Arc is designed to serve all three at once, meeting the standards global financial services firms demand while remaining open to builders of all sizes. It features predictable stablecoin fees, deterministic sub-second settlement finality, and upcoming opt-in privacy features that let businesses and users selectively shield balances, transactions, and counterparties while preserving auditability.

Along with Circle, Arc will have a phased rollout from the founding validator cohort that includes BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay (now Global Payments). The institutions that clear the world’s securities, run its payment rails, and manage its capital are not simply connecting to Arc; they will participate in the operation of the network itself, securing a public blockchain built to meet institutional needs.

For global banks, Arc supports financial activity worldwide unconstrained by market hours, including 24/7 intraday FX and repo, cross-border payments, treasury and liquidity management, tokenized asset issuance, and capital markets settlement. Augustus, Bank Frick, BNY, BTG Pactual, Commerzbank, HSBC, Lead Bank, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered, State Street, Wenia, and more are already building on Arc.

For asset managers and RWA issuers, Arc gives a unified platform to issue, manage, and distribute assets across 20+ blockchain ecosystems through Circle CCTP, with live DeFi markets that make those assets collateral-ready, tradeable, and productive worldwide. Asseto, Bitwise, BlackRock, Dinari, Huma Finance, Janus Henderson, New York Life Investment Management in partnership with Centrifuge, Maple, Matrixdock, ProShares, Securitize, USD.ai, and xStocks by Payward are working to bring tokenized financial products onchain with Arc.

For global payments firms and fintechs, Arc's sub-cent stablecoin fees and deterministic sub-second settlement finality provide an alternative to aspects of the correspondent banking stack with open, global rails that finalize network transactions in under a second. Alfred Pay, BVNK, Catena, Cycles, Digital Garage, Global Payments, HIFI, JCB, Mastercard, MoneyGram, MoonPay, Noah, OwlPay, Pulsar, Rain, Tazapay, Thunes, Transak, UQPay, Visa, and Wirex will be enabling internet-scale settlement with stablecoins and building always-on and AI-powered global payments.

The world's assets on one settlement layer

Arc brings a broad set of assets into one shared environment for payments, FX, lending, borrowing, trading, and settlement.

• Fiat stablecoins: Arc supports USDC, EURC, AUDD, AUDF, BRLA, CADD, CHFAU, EURAU, GBPA, JPYC, KRW1, MXNB, QCAD, SEKAU, TRYB, wARS, wBRL, wCLP, wCOP, wMXN, wPEN, and ZARU. Through Circle StableFX, these assets can be exchanged with atomic payment-versus-payment settlement, helping reduce settlement windows and counterparty risk. FX liquidity is provided by competitive market makers across the industry.
• Tokenized assets: BlackRock's BUIDL, tokenized by Securitize, Circle's USYC, and Janus Henderson's JAAA and JTRSY launch natively on Arc, bringing tokenized funds into the same environment as live lending, borrowing, trading, FX, and payments infrastructure.
• Bitcoin: cirBTC, Circle’s institutional-grade programmable Bitcoin, launches natively on Arc. Convertible 1:1 from BTC, cbBTC, or wBTC with no fees, and with reserves independently verifiable onchain in real time, cirBTC can be used as collateral, liquidity, and productive capital across Arc’s DeFi ecosystem.

Arc is also the multichain issuance hub for the next wave of stablecoins and tokenized assets. Issuers can launch once on Arc and distribute assets natively across 20+ chains through Circle CCTP, connecting new assets to live markets and giving them immediate utility.

Live and liquid markets from launch

On a single network, a business can receive payments from a global user base, lend into Aave or Morpho vaults to earn, post collateral to borrow or trade, pay vendors and partners or send remittances across borders, and buy assets and collectibles, all through connected workflows that settle in under a second.

Circle StableFX is live today on Arc, bringing 24/7 programmable FX across 20+ fully-reserved stablecoins; Circle Payments Network connects payment operators to Arc's settlement layer and StableFX for cross-border treasury, remittance, merchant payouts, and B2B payments.

For borrow, lend, and earn activities, Aave and Morpho anchor Arc's onchain credit markets at launch, with Bitwise, Cumberland, Dialectic, Galaxy, Gauntlet, Keyrock, and Steakhouse Financial supporting the ecosystem in different capacities including through curated vault strategies, risk oversight, and the supply of USDC and EURC for borrowing and lending.

For trading and liquidity access, Aero and Uniswap bring deep, established markets to Arc. 0x, 1inch, Alph, Aster, Bankr, Curve, Definitive, Doppler, edgeX, Extended, fomo, Hibachi, KyberSwap, LI.FI, o1.Exchange, Merkl, OpenSea, pools.trade, Pump.fun, RhinoFi, Robinhood, and Swapper expand access across spot trading, structured products, perpetuals, NFTs, and crosschain execution.

The world's leading digital asset exchanges are live on Arc, including Binance, Bitrue, Bitso, Bitvavo, Bybit, Coins.ph, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, LBank, MEXC, Mobee, OKX, OSL, Paribu, PDAX, SwissBorg, Tokocrypto, and Upbit. Coinbase and others will be live on Arc soon. Together, they provide users and institutions with familiar, seamless access points into Arc.

For digital wallets and consumer apps such as Alcove, Backpack, Binance Wallet, Bitget Wallet, Bron, DCent, ether.fi, Gate Web3, imToken, KuCoin Web3, Ledger, MetaMask, OKX Wallet, Para, Phantom, Rabby, Rainbow, SafePal, Superfluid, Tangem, Trust Wallet, WalletConnect, and Zerion connect Arc's markets to hundred of millions of existing users from day one.

Underpinning Arc is a broad set of infrastructure providers built for institutions, builders, and regulated financial activity:

• Custody providers: Anchorage, BitGo, Cactus, Copper, Ceffu, DFNS, Fireblocks, Fordefi, Komainu, Safe, Taurus, Utila, and Zodia Custody provide institutional custody infrastructure.
• Compliance and security: Blockaid, Chainalysis, Elliptic, Hypernative, Socure, Tenderly, and TRM Labs support compliance monitoring, risk management, and security.
• Crosschain interoperability: Aleo (via xReserve), Across, Bungee, Eco, Fast, LayerZero, Relay, Socket, and Stargate connect Arc to the broader multichain ecosystem.
• Embedded wallet infrastructure: Crossmint, Dynamic, Pimlico, Turnkey, and ZeroDev make embedded wallet experiences simple to build.
• Infrastructure and market data providers: Alchemy, Allium, BCW, Blockdaemon, Blockscout, Chainlink, Chronicle, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, DeFiLlama, Dune, dRPC, Figment, Goldsky, Kaleido, Kiln, Merkl, Pyth, Quicknode, Redstone, Stork, and The Graph provide the tools, market data, and infrastructure developers need to build on Arc.

The result is an ecosystem where builders don't need to bootstrap liquidity, institutions finally have onchain infrastructure that meets their rigorous standards, and users can start participating immediately. The assets, markets, tools, ramps, and access points are all live and ready to use.

This is Arc today. Here's what's next.

Arc launches with an institutional validator set, designed for reliability and day-one production readiness. It is also the beginning of a longer journey that moves toward broader participation in running the network, opt-in privacy for the institutions using it, and deeper interoperability with the chains where value already lives.

That broader participation starts with the network's own token. This week, Circle completed the genesis mint of the ARC token in the US, creating the full initial supply of 10 billion tokens — making Circle the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new Layer-1 blockchain. ARC is designed to serve as a digital commodity intended to act as the native coordination mechanism for security, utility, and governance on Arc, with network fees remaining payable in USDC. This initial mint is not a commitment to publicly launch ARC, but an important technical milestone in the Arc roadmap as the network explores a future transition from Proof of Authority toward Proof of Stake in 2027.

Privacy is the next piece. Arc’s opt-in privacy features are designed to help solve one of the core adoption blockers for businesses and consumer apps: enabling confidential transactions and private state that protect sensitive data from public exposure without sacrificing auditability, governance controls, or usability for enterprise and developer workflows.

Interoperability advances in parallel, through both network-layer improvements and Circle's broader multichain infrastructure, as does work on high-volume stablecoin payments and supporting the agentic economy. Each extends a decade of Circle's work on USDC, payments, regulatory credibility, institutional relationships, and DeFi connectivity into the Economic OS for the internet.

The foundation is laid. Make your mark.

Arc Mainnet is live, and the opportunity now moves to the people and organizations building on it.

To the developers, founders, engineers, and entrepreneurs: Build on a platform where the foundation is already in place. The tooling is here. The liquidity is here. The infrastructure for the agentic economy is here. Explore the docs, build with Arc Studio and Arc App Kits, and deploy on Arc Mainnet.

To the institutions that move the world's capital: Help shape the next generation of market infrastructure. Partner with Circle to issue assets, build new financial products, and run faster, more efficient global operations. Learn more about Arc.

To the autonomous agents and the developers building them: Leverage infrastructure that was designed for you from the start. Policy-controlled wallets, gas-free nanopayments, and programmatic market access are live. Start now with Circle Agent Stack.

To the users arriving alongside us: Connect a wallet and explore onchain opportunities through supported third-party DeFi protocols. Borrow against your assets without selling them. Send money globally and convert currencies instantly. Arc Portal is where it all starts.

Arc, the Economic OS for the internet, is onchain and open for business. Join us.