Circle’s Chandhok says stablecoins will be real money as Arc Mainnet goes live

Circle just did something banks have been talking about for years without actually doing it. On September 16, 2026, the company behind USDC launched Arc, a Layer-1 blockchain built specifically for financial markets and real-time payments, and invited some of the most powerful names in traditional finance to run it with them.

BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, and Standard Chartered are among the founding validators.

What Arc actually is

Arc is a purpose-built blockchain assigned chain ID 5042, designed to handle dollar-denominated payments at institutional scale. Gas fees are paid in USDC, not in a native speculative token, which is a deliberate design choice that removes one of the biggest friction points for corporate treasury teams trying to use blockchain rails.

The network offers sub-second deterministic finality and is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, meaning developers can port existing smart contract code without rebuilding from scratch.

At genesis, Circle minted 10 billion ARC tokens. The company has not committed to any public distribution schedule for those tokens, so what role they play in the long-term network economy remains an open question.

The network is currently operating under a permissioned validation model, with a planned transition to Proof-of-Stake architecture in 2027. Circle is also building in opt-in privacy features, a nod to the fact that institutions generally do not want their settlement activity visible to competitors on a public ledger.

Chandhok’s stablecoin argument

Circle’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, Nikhil Chandhok, has been making a pointed case: stablecoins are not crypto assets dressed up as money. They are money, full stop.

His argument lands with more force now that regulatory frameworks are catching up. The GENIUS Act, which establishes a federal framework for payment stablecoins in the United States, gives issuers like Circle the legal scaffolding to make that claim credibly.

Arc supports multiple stablecoins beyond USDC, and includes a feature called StableFX that handles cross-currency settlement between them.

Who is already building on it

The launch ecosystem is not a blank canvas. Aave V4, Morpho, and Uniswap are live on the network from day one. Tokenized funds including BlackRock’s BUIDL and USYC are also present.

The network’s private mainnet and testing phases processed hundreds of millions of transactions before the public launch.

What this means for institutional finance

The composition of Arc’s validator set tells you everything about the intended customer. DTCC clears and settles the majority of US securities transactions. Visa and Mastercard run the payment rails that most of the world uses daily. Standard Chartered bridges emerging market flows that correspondent banking handles slowly and expensively.

The predictable fee structure, denominated in a stable asset rather than a volatile native token, is one of the most underappreciated design decisions here. Corporate finance teams build payment systems around cost certainty. A gas fee that can spike tenfold during network congestion is unusable in a treasury context. Paying fees in USDC at predictable rates is a requirement, not a feature.