Global financial technology company Circle has officially launched Arc Mainnet, powered by Chainlink’s institutional-grade oracle platform from day one.
Arc is an open layer-1 blockchain for financial markets, real-time money movement, and agentic economic activity. Secured by a founding validator cohort of top global financial institutions including BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Arc is already utilized by major international banks and asset managers exploring tokenized assets, funds, and cross-border settlement.
Arc is the first blockchain purpose-built for AI agents as economic actors. Fees on Arc are paid with USDC, the world’s largest regulated USD stablecoin with more than $74 billion in circulation. USDC is the most-used stablecoin for AI-driven transactions, accounting for approximately 98% of all autonomous machine-to-machine and AI agent payments.
In an official announcement, Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s co-founder, Chairman, and CEO, praised Arc as Circle’s “single most significant launch” since USDC.
“The agentic economy and the onchain economy are not two different revolutions; they are the same economy seen from two sides, and both need infrastructure that never closes, settles in under a second, and is trusted by the institutions that anchor the global financial system,” he said.
“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.”
Arc’s opt-in privacy design, combined with a permissioned validator set and regulatory clarity established by the GENIUS Act, enables banks, asset managers, and enterprises to use a public blockchain for treasury, trading, and confidential payments.
“Purpose-built blockchains can help accelerate adoption of digital asset use cases, and Arc appears clearly well positioned to serve stablecoin and payment use cases at scale,” said Robbie Mitchnick, Global Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock.
Arc has established Chainlink as one of its key ecosystem players since its testnet launch last October.
In February, Arc testnet integrated the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), which provides an orchestration layer for institutions to seamlessly connect with onchain finance.
In June, Arc joined the Chainlink Scale program to accelerate its ecosystem growth via Chainlink Data Feeds, Data Streams, Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), and Proof of Reserve. All four of these essential tokenization services are live on Arc Mainnet at launch.
To learn more about Arc, visit their website, X, and Discord.