Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has a theory about the future of money: most of it won’t be moved by humans. It’ll be moved by AI agents, autonomously, in amounts so small they’d make a credit card processor weep. And the infrastructure to make that happen? That’s what Arc is supposed to be.

Arc is Circle’s purpose-built Layer-1 blockchain, pitched as the “Economic OS for the internet.” The company raised $222 million in a private presale of its native ARC token, achieving a fully diluted valuation of $3 billion. The backers include BlackRock, a16z crypto, Apollo, Standard Chartered, and ARK Invest.

What Arc actually does

Arc is designed to fix that. The blockchain promises sub-second settlements and privacy controls, specifically optimized for AI-driven economic activities. In English: it’s built so autonomous software can transact with other autonomous software without waiting for a bank to open on Monday morning.

Alongside the token presale, Circle launched what it calls the Circle Agent Stack. This is a suite of tools that gives AI agents the ability to manage USDC, discover services, and automate transactions across multiple blockchains.

Allaire has emphasized that Arc provides the operating system for an emerging economy powered by AI, unlocking digital business models through features like programmable dollars and nanopayments. A nanopayment, for context, is exactly what it sounds like: a payment so tiny that processing it on Visa or Mastercard would cost more in fees than the transaction itself is worth.

The road to launch

Circle introduced a public testnet on October 28, 2025, targeting sectors including payments and capital markets. The full launch came on May 11, 2026, with roughly 740 million ARC tokens sold during the presale. That $222 million raise at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation puts ARC’s implied token price at roughly $4.05.

Circle’s existing USDC stablecoin infrastructure serves as the foundation. USDC already operates across multiple blockchains, and Arc builds on that footprint while introducing features tailored for institutional finance and automated economic interactions.

What this means for investors

The presence of BlackRock and Standard Chartered in a token presale is not a small thing. These are firms that manage or facilitate trillions of dollars in assets. Their participation suggests a thesis that AI-native financial infrastructure isn’t a niche experiment.

The risk is that the agentic economy itself remains more theoretical than practical. Investors betting on Arc are effectively betting that machine-to-machine commerce becomes a significant category before competitors build equivalent rails on existing blockchains.