Stablecoin issuer Circle has secured $222 million in a token presale for its new blockchain project, Arc, drawing investment from financial giants like BlackRock and Apollo.
Image: Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Co-Founder of Circle.
The American stablecoin company Circle Internet Group, best known as the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, is expanding its operations by launching a proprietary blockchain tailored for institutional players. The capital raise values the new network, named Arc, at $3 billion fully diluted. The transaction also marks a rare instance where a public company has raised capital through a presale of digital tokens.
The funding round was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which alone contributed $75 million. The investment also attracted a notable lineup of established players from the traditional financial sector, including asset manager BlackRock, Apollo Funds, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), ARK Invest, and Standard Chartered Ventures.
This participation highlights a growing interest among established financial institutions in the underlying infrastructure of digital assets and transactional systems.
With the creation of the Arc blockchain, Circle aims to position itself as more than just an issuer of digital dollars. The company is seeking to deliver a broader, more comprehensive platform structure.
"We’re becoming a broader internet platform company. We’re getting into the operating system business, and we’re doing it by building this distributed model with a token and a distributed network," Jeremy Allaire, Chief Executive of Circle, told CNBC.
The new blockchain is specifically engineered to support institutional financial services and integration with artificial intelligence (AI). In tandem with the launch, Circle is introducing tools designed to allow autonomous AI agents to initiate and settle transactions directly using USDC.
"We are entering an era where software machines are going to run the economic system. Software is going to do most of the work—and that’s what AI agents represent," Allaire said.
The company has released a technical whitepaper outlining the role of the network's new utility token, ARC. The token will be utilized for governance and security on the network.
The total supply will be capped at 10 billion tokens at genesis, with the distribution structured as follows:
The unveiling of the new blockchain initiative coincides with Circle reporting significant growth in its core operations for the first quarter of 2026.
The circulation of the company's stablecoin, USDC, grew by 28 percent during the quarter, reaching a total of $77 billion. On-chain transaction volume surged by 263 percent during the same period, reaching $21.5 trillion. Concurrently, Circle’s total revenue and reserve interest income rose by 20 percent to $694 million in the first quarter.
For those who want to understand how Circle, USDC, and Arc connect, you can find a background article in our wiki. Read more here.
You have read what you can read for free. With an account you get unlimited access to all news and articles on kaupr.io — and become part of the network of investors, professionals and builders following onchain finance.
