Circle isn’t content with just being the company behind the world’s second-largest stablecoin. He 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 talk behind Arc, Circle’s enterprise-grade Layer 1 blockchain designed to serve as what the company calls the “cost-effective operating system for the Internet.” CEO Jeremy Allaire presented Arc as essential infrastructure for an agentic economy, in which autonomous software agents need programmable, real-time payment rails to operate at scale.
What Arc actually does
Design priorities tell you everything about the intended user base: transaction finality in less than a second, stablecoin-denominated gas fees starting with $USDCand integrated logic for policy enforcement and agent coordination.
Through what Circle calls “nanopayments,” transaction fees can be as low as $0.000001. For high-frequency, low-value machine-to-machine payments, these economics essentially make the difference between viable and unviable.
Arc’s public testnet went live on October 28, 2025 and attracted participation from more than 100 companies.
The $222 million presale and who’s behind it
On May 11, 2026, Circle announced that it had completed a $222 million pre-sale for the native product. $ARC token, landing at a fully diluted valuation of $3 billion.
The list of investors includes a16z Crypto, BlackRock, Apollo, Standard Chartered and Intercontinental Exchange.
Circle has also rolled out complementary AI infrastructure products alongside the token presale. These are development tools designed to facilitate the creation of autonomous economic agents that can participate in the Arc ecosystem.
THE $ARC The token itself will play a role in governance and is expected to align with a future proof-of-stake mechanism, although the specifics of the token’s utility remain somewhat undefined at this point.
Why this matters to Circle’s overall vision
Circle went public on the NYSE under the symbol CRCL, and this move into infrastructure represents a significant expansion of its business model. For years, Circle’s story was relatively simple: problem $USDCearn yield on reserves, repeat.
In wording the gas costs in $USDC Rather than a volatile native token, Arc avoids one of the most persistent complaints about blockchain transaction costs: you never know how much a transaction will actually cost because the fee token keeps moving.
