With Arc’s testnet now live, Circle aims to redefine digital finance through dollar-priced fees, sub-second settlement, and privacy-enhanced blockchain architecture.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has unveiled his bold vision for Arc, a new blockchain platform designed to power the next generation of financial infrastructure. Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative 2025 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Allaire described Arc as “an economic operating system for the internet,” emphasizing that core financial workflows are moving on-chain and require predictable costs, high performance, and privacy.
Arc’s public testnet, launched on October 28, marks the first phase of what Circle hopes will become a global financial backbone. The mainnet rollout is targeted for 2026, giving developers time to test smart contracts, transaction flows, and token issuance.
According to Allaire, Arc is engineered for payments, foreign exchange, lending, and capital-markets activity, built around USDC-denominated fees, sub-second finality, and configurable privacy. These features are designed to help enterprises shield sensitive balances and transactions while maintaining compliance.
Allaire highlighted USDC’s expanding footprint, noting that growth remains strong in emerging markets—particularly across the Middle East—as firms seek to settle in digital dollars without the limitations of legacy banking systems. “Demand from emerging markets is very significant,” he said, citing Circle’s regulatory build-out in the UAE as a key enabler of regional adoption.
He also pointed to recent U.S. legislation providing clarity around payment stablecoins, which has encouraged larger corporations to integrate stablecoin payments, FX, and credit workflows.
On the ecosystem front, over 100 companies—spanning banking, payments, technology, and AI—are participating in the Arc initiative. Allaire positioned the project as transactional and ecosystem-driven, with a long-term goal of distributed governance and open participation, not a single-company monopoly.
“Arc offers predictable costs, fast finality, and compliance-friendly privacy,” Allaire stated, describing the platform as a foundation for programmable finance where digital dollars serve as the connective tissue of global commerce.
With Arc, Circle aims to merge blockchain efficiency with institutional-grade reliability, providing a scalable framework for the tokenized financial future. As Allaire put it, the project represents more than infrastructure — it’s a strategic step toward embedding finance into the very fabric of the internet.
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