According to the firm:
“Arc aims to establish itself as foundational infrastructure for regulated money movement, supporting a globally distributed financial system.”
Circle said Arc will integrate fully with its existing platform while maintaining interoperability with dozens of other partner blockchains.
Arc’s public testnet is scheduled for release between September and December 2025.
Arc will serve as a high-performance base for stablecoin payments, foreign exchange (FX), and capital markets applications.
Arc will also integrate confidential transfers, enabling hidden amounts with visible addresses, alongside selective disclosure via a “view key.”
Meanwhile, its MEV mitigation roadmap includes encrypted mempools, batch processing, and multi-proposer setups.
Arc will support Circle’s USYC, an interest-bearing stablecoin backed by short-term US Treasury securities. It will also offer fast bridging via Circle’s CCTP and Gateway, a built-in currency trading system for approved institutions, and AI-powered treasury management tools.
Beyond stablecoins, Arc is designed to host regulated real-world assets such as tokenized equities, bonds, private credit, and institutional-grade funds.
Circle plans to partner with licensed asset issuers, custodians, and fund administrators to ensure these assets are legally compliant, fully collateralized, and integrated with traditional financial obligations.
Despite its ambitious design, Arc has faced pushback from crypto community members.
According to him, the network is more accurately a consortium chain operated by a set of pre-approved, private validators. These validators, he noted, have the authority to reverse transactions through “dispute protocols.”
Moreover, he also argued that using USDC as the root token removes the economic incentives needed for validators to act independently, making a decentralized Layer 1 model unfeasible. As a result, he said, the design necessitates a closed, consortium-based structure.
Cochran concluded:
“Blockchains exist because exploitative middlemen, like banks and transfer agents, take undue fees and apply undue censorship. This industry was built to fix that in peer-to-peer systems, not by just building new banks.”
