Circle's Arc mainnet goes live with BlackRock, Visa and DTCC as validators
Circle's USDC-native layer-1 opened to the public this week with over 100 applications live at launch and a validator set built from BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard and Visa.
Circle opened the public mainnet for Arc, its own layer-1 blockchain, on Tuesday — an EVM-compatible network that charges gas fees in USDC and offers sub-second finality. More than 100 applications launched alongside it, including Aave V4, Morpho and Uniswap, with Circle's own payments network and multi-currency StableFX service integrated from day one.
The validator list is the actual story
Arc's founding validator group is not crypto-native infrastructure — it is BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard and Visa, onboarding in phases alongside the wider ecosystem. That is a materially different bet than most new layer-1 launches: Circle is building settlement rails aimed squarely at institutions already running the world's clearing and card networks, not at retail DeFi users.
What Circle did and did not commit to
The company minted 10 billion ARC tokens this week as a technical milestone for the network's governance and security layer, but has stopped short of committing to a public token launch or listing. USDC remains the currency that actually pays for gas. Circle says it plans to move Arc from proof-of-authority to proof-of-stake in 2027, and the DTCC partnership is expected to extend into tokenizing custodied assets later that year.
Source: The Block