Circle launches Arc mainnet with BlackRock, Visa and other founding validators

Arc, Circle’s open layer 1 blockchain for financial markets and internet-native money movement, is now live on the public mainnet, the company announced Wednesday. The network launched with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders, more than 100 applications and validators including BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, Visa and other major financial institutions. Arc is built around several financial-market features, including USDC-denominated gas fees, sub-second finality and support for tokenized assets and stablecoins. It will support USDC and EURC alongside tokenized real-world assets, while Circle StableFX provides 24/7 cross-currency settlement and Circle Payments Network is integrated for near-real-time cross-border payments. Opt-in privacy is also being developed for network-wide deployment, with confidential balances and transactions alongside view-key access. Arc’s day-one financial ecosystem includes Aero, fomo and Uniswap for trading, as well as USYC, BUIDL, private credit funds and cirBTC for assets that can be traded, lent or used as collateral. Circle said the combination of a permissioned validator set, institutional participation and its privacy architecture...