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Circle launches Arc mainnet with BlackRock’s BUIDL available on the network

Photorealistic cityscape with a glowing arc bridge between financial institutions and floating USDC tokens.

Circle has launched the public mainnet of Arc, its blockchain for financial markets and real-time money movement, and said BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized fund is now available on the network. In a press release on the launch, the company described Arc as an economic operating system for the internet and said the network is designed around institutional use cases.

The launch brings Arc out of its earlier testing phase and into public mainnet operation. Circle said the network includes institutional validators and support for financial applications, with BUIDL among the tokenized assets available at launch. The company also said Arc is built to support real-time money movement and uses USDC for gas fees.

Institutional names at launch

Circle said the founding validator set includes firms such as BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa and Worldpay. The company said more than 100 institutional and ecosystem participants are live on the network at launch.

The network is also positioned around broader financial infrastructure use cases. Circle said Arc supports Circle StableFX for cross-currency settlement and integrates with Circle Payments Network. It added that the launch includes trading infrastructure from projects such as Aero, fomo and Uniswap.

What the launch makes available

Among the assets available on Arc, Circle highlighted USYC and BUIDL, alongside other tokenized or stablecoin products. The company said the network is EVM-compatible and that transaction fees are paid in USDC rather than in a native volatile token.

Circle also said Arc’s testnet processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year and that its developer community includes more than 75,000 Arc House members who have built more than 1,200 projects. Those figures refer to activity before the mainnet launch and help frame the scale Circle is pointing to as it opens the network more broadly.

The launch places BUIDL on a new blockchain setting at a time when Circle is trying to position Arc as a settlement layer for institutional finance rather than a general-purpose retail chain. The practical significance now depends on how much activity moves onto the network after launch and how the named participants use it in practice.