Circle raised $222 million in Arc token presale ahead of mainnet launch

Circle's Arc mainnet went live Wednesday with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem partners on day one, and founding validators including BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered and SBI Group.

Gas fees for the Arc network are paid through Circle's dollar-backed stablecoin USDC, according to a Circle statement.

Circle completed the genesis mint of ARC this week, creating all 10 billion tokens, making it the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new Layer 1.

The opt-in privacy feature for sensitive transactions that financial institutions may want to conduct on Arc is still in development and not yet network-wide.

Circle is developing an opt-in Privacy Sector that would let users hide balances and transaction details while selectively revealing information when necessary, running private transactions inside trusted execution environments, protected hardware enclaves that keep their contents hidden even from Circle and Arc's validators.

Circle says its Arc testnet, which launched last year with BlackRock and Visa among the participants, processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year.

More than 100 applications are live on Arc, spanning foundational DeFi including Uniswap, Aave and Morpho as well as memecoin apps fomo and Pump.fun.

Circle had already raised $222 million in an Arc token presale at a $3 billion valuation.

Transactions on Arc reach finality in under a second, and developers can deploy permissionlessly even though the network launches with a permissioned set of known validators.

Circle presents its permissioned validator model as a selling point, pairing it with a "defined governance perimeter" it says lets banks use a public chain for treasury, trading and confidential payments.

"You can't have transaction data running on public rails and being visible," Grealish said. "That's part of the beauty of Bitcoin, but it's the beast for institutional investors."

BNY, HSBC, Lead Bank and State Street are among the publicly named banks and investment firms that are either already live on or are exploring Arc, according to a company statement from Circle.

BNY, HSBC, Societe Generale and State Street are among the banks with access to Arc.

USDC accounts for 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume, Circle said, citing Dune.

Circle's model to date has been to distribute USDC wherever users already are, such as Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tron, with chains competing for its liquidity; with Arc the stablecoin issuer will be building its own blockspace instead of only renting it.

American Banker reports that the crypto market structure bill failed a Senate vote 49-50, leaving U.S. digital asset regulation in flux after a procedural vote for the CLARITY Act.

Circle first announced plans for the EVM-compatible Arc L1 in August 2025 and the chain's testnet rolled out in October 2025.

Coin Bureau's Nic Puckrin said that the validators behind Arc, like BlackRock, DTCC, Visa and Mastercard, "are what give it credibility."

Alenka Grealish, principal analyst at Celent, told American Banker that the Arc blockchain is "institutional-grade" because it can offer firms conducting business on the network predictable fees.

"Institutions don't want to hold a cryptocurrency," Grealish said. "How can Circle deliver predictable fees? In a trusted stablecoin."

"The other issue with public blockchain is there's no call center," Grealish said.

"Arc's native capabilities, including predictable fees and instant finality, address real friction points these customers raised," Michael Blaugrund, vice president of strategic initiatives at ICE, said in a statement.

If the $3 billion presale valuation covered the full 10 billion token mint, each ARC token is 30 cents, and $222 million corresponds to about 740 million tokens, roughly 7.4% of supply.

More than 700 million testnet transactions in under a year averages about 1.9 million a day.