Overview
- Circle announced on Wednesday that Arc will go live on the public mainnet on Sept. 16 and that founding validators will include BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard and Standard Chartered.
- Arc is already running in a private mainnet with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem participants building payments, trading and tokenization use cases for the public launch.
- Circle says BlackRock will deploy its BUIDL tokenized money market fund at launch and that DTCC plans to integrate DTC-tokenized assets with Arc starting in the second half of 2027.
- The project raised $222 million in a May presale that implied a $3 billion fully diluted valuation, and Circle plans to ship AI developer tools, tokenized-asset services and a composable application framework at launch.
- Circle touts fast testnet metrics — over 150 million transactions in 90 days and roughly 0.5 second settlement on average — but independent verification is limited and real-world performance under live economic activity will be the key test.