The USDC issuer is building a Layer-1 chain where AI agents can transact at machine speed for fractions of a cent, backed by $222 million in presale funding from BlackRock and a16z.
Circle isn’t content just being the company behind the world’s second-largest stablecoin. It wants to build the financial plumbing for a future where AI agents buy, sell, and settle transactions without waiting for a human to click “approve.”
That’s the pitch behind Arc, Circle’s enterprise-grade Layer-1 blockchain designed to serve as what the company calls the “Economic OS for the internet.” CEO Jeremy Allaire has framed Arc as essential infrastructure for an agentic economy, one where autonomous software agents need programmable, real-time payment rails to function at scale.
What Arc actually does #
The design priorities tell you everything about the intended user base: sub-second transaction finality, stablecoin-denominated gas fees starting with USDC, and embedded logic for policy enforcement and agent coordination.
Through what Circle calls “Nanopayments,” transaction fees can drop as low as $0.000001. For high-frequency, low-value machine-to-machine payments, those economics are essentially the difference between viable and not viable.
Arc’s public testnet went live on October 28, 2025, and attracted participation from over 100 companies.
The $222 million presale and who’s behind it #
On May 11, 2026, Circle announced it had completed a $222 million presale for the native ARC token, landing at a fully diluted valuation of $3 billion.
The investor list includes a16z Crypto, BlackRock, Apollo, Standard Chartered, and Intercontinental Exchange.
Circle also rolled out complementary AI infrastructure products alongside the token presale. These are developer tools designed to make it easier to build autonomous economic agents that can participate in the Arc ecosystem.
The ARC token itself will play a role in governance and is expected to align with a future proof-of-stake mechanism, though the specifics of token utility remain somewhat undefined at this stage.
Why this matters for Circle’s bigger picture #
Circle went public on the NYSE under the ticker CRCL, and this move toward infrastructure is a significant expansion of its business model. For years, Circle’s story was relatively simple: issue USDC, earn yield on the reserves, repeat.
By denominating gas fees in USDC rather than a volatile native token, Arc sidesteps one of the more persistent complaints about blockchain transaction costs: that you never know what a transaction will actually cost because the fee token keeps moving.
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