Overview
- Circle opened Arc’s public testnet, drawing participants such as BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, State Street, BNY, Standard Chartered, Visa, Mastercard, AWS, Cloudflare, Coinbase and Kraken.
- Arc is EVM‑compatible and uses USDC and other stablecoins for gas, offering predictable dollar‑based fees, sub‑second finality and opt‑in privacy with direct integration to Circle’s platform.
- Institutions are piloting stablecoin‑denominated settlement, on‑chain FX and programmable workflows for payments, capital markets and tokenization, according to company and participant statements.
- Ecosystem integrations span wallets (MetaMask, Ledger), developer tooling (Alchemy, Chainlink), bridges (Wormhole), DEX liquidity (Uniswap, Curve), CEX connectivity (Coinbase, Kraken) and market makers (Galaxy Digital, Wintermute).
- Circle is stewarding the network during testing and outlines a transition to broader validator participation and community governance, with any mainnet launch contingent on successful validation by participants.