Stablecoin issuers are not satisfied with just “sending out money”—they built their own chain
On August 5, Circle published the list of its Arc chain’s founding validator nodes. On September 16, this chain went live on the mainnet.
The validator list is packed with heavyweight Wall Street institutions. BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, Standard Chartered, SBI, and Galaxy. Plus MoneyGram and Global Payments, and Sumitomo. A total of 11 firms. One asset manager, one clearinghouse, two card networks, and two banks—all coming to serve as validator nodes for the public chain.
Arc is the native chain for USDC. Gas is paid in dollars. You don’t need to buy volatile coins first. Transaction fees are priced directly in USDC. Final settlement takes less than half a second. The virtual machine is EVM-compatible.
BlackRock deploys its BUIDL money market fund on it. The point of interest here isn’t the stablecoin itself—it’s Circle’s strategy. Previously, when USDC settled on Ethereum, the gas flowed into the pockets of ETH stakers, while Circle only took the interest on its reserves. Now, it runs its own chain, so every gas fee goes into Circle’s own pocket.
Circle’s CEO says this isn’t just issuing stablecoins—it’s building an operating-system layer for economic activity.
With the mainnet launching on September 16, there are only 8 days left. Stablecoin issuers want to shift from being “people who send money” to “people who collect tolls from travelers.”
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