Circle pushes beyond USDC with Arc, an institutional blockchain backed by a $222m presale
The significance of Circle's latest move is not the headline number but where the money is pointed. The stablecoin issuer has raised $222m in a token presale to fund Circle's new blockchain network, Arc, built explicitly for banks, corporates and treasury teams rather than crypto traders. For institutions watching stablecoins migrate from the fringe to the plumbing of payments, it signals that the dominant USDC issuer now wants to own the rails as well as the token.
The presale was led by Andreessen Horowitz, which contributed $75m. The wider investor list reads like an institutional roll call: BlackRock, Apollo Funds, Intercontinental Exchange, SBI Group, Janus Henderson Investors, Standard Chartered Ventures, General Catalyst, Marshall Wace, ARK Invest, IDG Capital, Haun Ventures and Bullish. The 10 billion Arc tokens released give the network a $3bn valuation. Circle holds 25% of the initial release, 60% goes to users building on the network and 15% sits in long-term reserves.
Why a bank should care about Arc
Arc is engineered around the controls traditional finance demands. Transactions settle almost instantly, privacy settings are adjustable, and the network is run by approved institutional operators rather than anonymous participants. The pitch is that treasury teams can move dollars on blockchain infrastructure while keeping the oversight they are accountable for. Circle's investors framed the gap plainly: "While USDC has become the trusted digital dollar for banks, corporations, and financial institutions seeking the speed of crypto without its volatility, there remains a problem. The internet infrastructure which USDC runs on today wasn't built with big institutions in mind."
The diversification logic is clear. USDC, launched in 2018, has grown to a market capitalisation above $77bn, and that incumbency gives Arc a liquidity and customer base most new chains lack. Chief executive Jeremy Allaire told CNBC the ambition is broad: "We want to build an operating system that has many, many stakeholders in it ... major companies who are running the infrastructure with us and who ultimately help to govern it."
An agentic angle
Alongside Arc, Circle unveiled its Agent Stack, an open infrastructure layer for autonomous software agents. It bundles Agent Wallets for controlled access to USDC and ERC-20 tokens, an Agent Marketplace and a command line interface for executing financial actions in natural language. Taken together, the launches position Circle for a future in which AI agents move money on regulated, institution-governed blockchain rails.
Source: Finovate.
