Invest6 publishers3 min readPublished
Circle raised $222 million in Arc token presale ahead of mainnet launch
Arc's mainnet went live Wednesday with BlackRock, DTCC, Visa and Mastercard among its founding validators, and the 10 billion ARC tokens Circle minted this week sit behind a presale that valued the network at $3 billion.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Arc's 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 on the network is paid in USDC, which has around $74 billion in circulation and is wired into the new chain as its gas token.
- Circle had already raised $222 million in an Arc token presale that valued the network at $3 billion before the mainnet opened.
- More than 100 applications are live, including the lending and trading venues Uniswap, Aave and Morpho alongside the memecoin apps fomo and Pump.fun.
- The opt-in privacy feature for the sensitive transactions financial institutions may want to conduct on Arc is still in development and not yet network-wide.
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Why it matters
- constraint Circle sells the permissioned validator set plus a "defined governance perimeter" as what lets a bank use a public chain for treasury, trading and confidential payments, and confidentiality is the one piece a buyer cannot test this quarter.
- exposure Presale buyers hold a token whose issuer says the mint does not commit it to a public launch, and the proof-of-stake transition that would give ARC a function is dated 2027.
- decision Circle has stopped being indifferent about where USDC moves. The chains that competed to host its liquidity are now bidding against the issuer for the same transactions.
- precedent A listed company minted an entire Layer 1 token supply and stopped short of promising a listing. The next public issuer has a template for doing the same.
Circle created the entire ARC supply this week, all 10 billion tokens, and it is the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new Layer 1 [4]. The mint "is not a commitment to publicly launch ARC," the company said, describing it as a technical step toward a possible move from proof of authority to proof of stake in 2027 [5]. Set the presale's $3 billion against 10 billion tokens and each one is 30 cents, which puts the $222 million at roughly 740 million tokens, about 7.4% of supply [7].
Michael Blaugrund, vice president of strategic initiatives at ICE, said in a statement that "Arc's native capabilities, including predictable fees and instant finality, address real friction points these customers raised" [29]. Finality is under a second, and while the validator set is permissioned, developers can deploy without permission [25]. Alenka Grealish, principal analyst at Celent, told American Banker that Arc is "institutional-grade" because it can offer predictable fees [12]. "Institutions don't want to hold a cryptocurrency," she said. "How can Circle deliver predictable fees? In a trusted stablecoin." [13]
Nic Puckrin of Coin Bureau said the validators, among them BlackRock, DTCC, Visa and Mastercard, "are what give it credibility" [11]. The two publishers describe the banks around Arc differently. American Banker names BNY, HSBC, Lead Bank and State Street as institutions either already live on Arc or exploring it [17]. Decrypt lists BNY, HSBC, Societe Generale and State Street among the banks with access [18]. Neither reports how much money has settled on the chain.
Circle's opt-in Privacy Sector would let users hide balances and transaction details while revealing them selectively [15]. Private transactions would run inside trusted execution environments, hardware enclaves whose contents stay hidden from Circle and from Arc's validators [15]. Grealish named the problem that addresses. "You can't have transaction data running on public rails and being visible," she said. "That's part of the beauty of Bitcoin, but it's the beast for institutional investors." [30] She also pointed to support: "The other issue with public blockchain is there's no call center." [16]
Arc ends the neutrality Circle has traded on. USDC went wherever users already were, on Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tron, and those chains competed for its liquidity; now Circle builds its own blockspace instead of only renting it [24]. Jeremy Allaire, Circle's co-founder and CEO, said in a statement that "Arc is the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself" [9].
Only the token has a price so far. The testnet that rolled out in October 2025 [27] processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year, according to Circle [19], an average of about 1.9 million a day [20]. None of them was a customer paying a production fee. The counter-case is agents: Circle, citing Dune, says USDC accounts for 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume [23], and if agent payments and the live application set carry the chain, bank treasury flow is a bonus. I would want one named bank to disclose settled volume before reading the validator roster as a customer list. The U.S. rulebook is open in the meantime, with the Senate's crypto market structure bill failing a procedural vote 49-50 [26].
What to watch
- Whether the opt-in Privacy Sector reaches mainnet, and whether transactions inside trusted execution environments satisfy bank confidentiality requirements.
- Whether Circle moves Arc from proof of authority to proof of stake in 2027 and lists ARC. Circle has said the genesis mint commits it to neither.
- Whether any of the named banks discloses settled volume on Arc.