Circle Launches Arc Mainnet With BlackRock, DTCC and Visa Producing Blocks

Circle on Wednesday opened Arc's public mainnet, a Layer 1 blockchain that charges gas in USDC and restricts block production to a permissioned cohort of regulated firms rather than an open validator market. The group Circle named as founding validators includes BlackRock, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa and Worldpay, alongside Circle itself; Circle says the cohort will come online in phases and that roughly 20 SOC 2‑certified operators will run validation across multiple regions.

Arc is designed to be fully EVM‑compatible so existing Solidity contracts and tooling work at launch. Fees are denominated in USDC with 18 decimals, use an EIP‑1559-like mechanism and target a base fee of roughly $0.01 per transaction while capping the base fee at 20,000 Gwei; Circle's materials put average weekly transaction cost at about $0.045. Consensus runs proof‑of‑authority on Tendermint BFT via Circle's Malachite implementation, with Circle reporting deterministic finality in under one second, benchmarks below 350 milliseconds, throughput above 3,000 transactions per second with 20 validators, and blocks targeting 30 million gas at a half‑second block time.

More than 100 applications were live at launch, and Circle highlighted DeFi integrations including Aave (deploying a V4 market) and Morpho for lending and credit, with support from firms such as Bitwise, Cumberland, Dialectic, Galaxy, Gauntlet, Keyrock and Steakhouse Financial. Trading and liquidity will be available through protocols and platforms including Uniswap, Aero Lite, fomo and a broader list of exchanges and venues named by Circle; custody and banking partners cited include Anchorage, BitGo, Ceffu, Copper, Fireblocks, Zodia Custody and banks such as BNY, HSBC, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered and State Street.

Separately, Circle completed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens in the United States this week and describes the mint as a technical milestone rather than a firm commitment to a public token launch. The ARC whitepaper allocates the supply with 60% for ecosystem uses (token sales, developer grants, growth), 25% to Circle and 15% to a long‑term reserve, and sets early inflation around 2–3% per year on a decaying schedule. Circle disclosed a $222 million presale conducted in May at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation — including a $75 million investment from a16z crypto and participation from multiple institutional buyers, some of which are now named partners or validators — and said it is studying a transition from proof‑of‑authority to proof‑of‑stake as early as 2027.