What Is Arc? Circle’s Stablecoin Layer-1, Explained

Arc is a Layer-1 blockchain built by Circle, the issuer of USDC. Public mainnet opens on September 16, 2026, the public testnet has been live since October 28, 2025, and the single design decision that defines the chain is this one: gas is paid in USDC, not in a volatile native token.

Works on Arc testnet today; mainnet September 16, 2026.

What is Arc, in one paragraph?

Arc is a Layer-1 blockchain built by Circle, the company that issues USDC. It is EVM-compatible, so Solidity contracts and the standard Ethereum toolchain work against it unchanged. Its consensus mechanism is called Malachite, and it produces deterministic finality in roughly 780 milliseconds — a transaction is settled the moment consensus commits it, rather than becoming progressively more likely to stick as blocks pile on top. Fees are charged in USDC at 18 decimals at the protocol level. On testnet those fees have averaged about $0.004 per transaction.

Why does gas in USDC matter?

Every other major chain asks you to hold two assets: the thing you actually want, and the thing you need to pay the network with. That second asset moves in price, which means a launch budget written in January is a different number in March, and a treasury has to hold an inventory of something volatile purely for operational reasons.

Arc removes that layer. The fee token is the dollar token. A founder pricing out a token deployment, a set of locks, a vesting schedule and a distribution run can quote all of it in dollars and be right, because the meter is denominated in the same unit as the budget. For an institution running payments or FX, the accounting consequence is larger still: there is no separate gas asset to mark, hedge or explain.

Who is actually behind Arc?

The founding validator set is unusual for a new chain, because it is mostly not crypto companies. Circle has named BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa.

Alongside them is a crypto-native day-one ecosystem: Aave, Aerodrome, Morpho and Uniswap for DeFi; FalconX, Galaxy, GSR, Keyrock, Nonco and XFX on the liquidity side; Rain, Thunes and Wirex in payments; and Binance Wallet, Chainlink, Fireblocks, Kraken, Ledger, MetaMask and Upbit across wallets, oracles, custody and venues. BlackRock is deploying BUIDL on Arc, and DTCC tokenization begins in the second half of 2027.

Read that list as a statement of intent. Arc is being positioned as settlement infrastructure that regulated institutions can actually use, and the sub-second deterministic finality is the property that makes that claim coherent — a clearing house cannot book "probably final".

What else ships with the chain?

Three features beyond the base ledger are worth knowing about:

• Opt-in privacy. Confidential transfers are supported, and they are opt-in rather than default, which is the shape a compliance-facing chain needs.
• StableFX. An onchain foreign-exchange engine, aimed at the case where two stablecoins in different currencies need to trade against each other on the ledger itself.
• More than one currency. EURC and other regional stablecoins are slated to follow USDC on the chain.

What is the state of Arc right now?

Three states run in parallel as of August 2026:

Testnet is genuinely busy: roughly 13.5 million transactions in the week of August 13–19, 2026. If you want to build now, testnet is where you build. The testnet guide walks the faucet and first transaction.

Mainnet chain ID, RPC endpoint and explorer host have not been published by Circle. Nothing on this hub states one, and you should treat any site that does with suspicion until it can point at arc.io or docs.arc.network.

Is there an ARC token?

No. A whitepaper published in May 2026 describes a potential coordination asset — staking, governance, fee mechanics, a path from proof-of-authority to proof-of-stake — and Circle's own framing of it is exploratory. No token has launched and no decision has been made. Press has reported a raise of roughly $222 million at a valuation near $3 billion, which is a funding fact, not a token fact.

The practical consequence: anything trading under the ARC ticker today is not Circle's. The full breakdown, including what an eventual token would and would not imply, is here.

What does this mean if you are launching a token?

It means the cost objection disappears. On Arc, minting a token, locking the liquidity, putting the team allocation under a schedule and airdropping to holders are all operations whose network cost is measured in fractions of a cent — quoted, paid and reconciled in dollars.

Team Finance covers that whole sequence: token creation, liquidity locks, team and NFT locks, vesting, staking pools, airdrops, multisender, payroll and a tokenomics planner. It has been live since 2020, is non-custodial, and has secured more than $2.7 billion across 40,000+ projects on 26 chains.

Start with minting a token on Arc, then lock the liquidity, then put the team allocation on a vesting schedule. In that order, because that is the order a buyer will check them in.