Circle Launches Arc Mainnet With BlackRock, Visa as Validators

 

Circle Internet Group has launched the mainnet of Arc, its Layer 1 blockchain purpose built for money and financial markets, with BlackRock and Visa among the chain’s founding validators.

 

Announcing the launch in a press release this Wednesday, Circle said Arc was launched with native integration into Circle’s full stack platform, with more than 100 applications already built atop it and more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders, including global banks, asset managers, payment networks, exchanges, DeFi protocols, crypto wallets, and AI platforms.

 

Among the validators for the Arc chain are BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay.

 

 

Describing Arc’s launch as Circle’s most significant launch since the launch of the USDC stablecoin, Circle Co Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said the Arc chain is the embodiment of what the Circle team has operated on for 13 years.

 

“Today we are switching on something the world has never had before: an open, neutral, always-on economic operating system for the internet, secured by some of the most important financial institutions on Earth, and built for a world where both people and machines transact.”

 

According to Circle, there are six features that set Arc apart from other chains: a chain gas fee denominated in dollars, which allows gas fees to be paid in USDC; sub-second finality, which ensures fast and instant settlement; opt in privacy, which ensures confidentiality of transactions; interoperability; agentic economic activity; and institutional security.

 

Alongside the Arc mainnet launch, Circle also released Arc Studio and Arc App Kits, which enable builders to create stablecoin native applications from scratch.

 

Arc Studio is an on-chain coding agent that turns ideas into implementations, enabling builders to create applications with market ready blockchain features faster, while Arc App Kits is a unified SDK that enables builders to add payments, swaps, on ramp, and other on-chain funding features to applications with just a few lines of code.