Circle said its public Arc blockchain mainnet will open on Sept. 16, using its Wednesday second-quarter earnings release to introduce a founding validator group made up largely of traditional finance firms.
BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa will secure the network alongside Circle.
Arc goes public on Sept. 16
Circle said BlackRock is expected to deploy BUIDL, its tokenized money market fund, on Arc. DTCC is set to enable tokenization of assets it custodies, although that is not expected until the second half of 2027.
In a post on X, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said Arc mainnet launches on Sept. 16, major firms are joining Arc, and the Circle Payments Network, or CPN, is seeing rapid quarterly growth.
Arc is currently in private mainnet with more than 100 builders. Allaire told analysts on the company’s Q2 earnings call that the testnet has processed more than half a billion transactions across nearly 3 million wallets. He described the validator line-up as “a cohort of network validators no other network can match.”
Aave, Morpho and Uniswap are listed as day-one DeFi protocols on the network. Binance Wallet, Kraken, Ledger and MetaMask will provide access. Gas fees on Arc will be paid in Circle’s stablecoin USDC.
Circle’s second quarter results
Circle reported $701 million in total revenue and reserve income for the quarter, up 7% from a year earlier and slightly above the previous quarter, though still below the $770 million it posted in the final quarter of 2025.
Reserve income came in at $668 million, up 5%, while the reserve return rate fell 66 basis points to 3.5%.
Net income was $48 million, compared with a $482 million loss a year earlier, when IPO stock compensation dominated the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA reached $143 million, up 8%.
USDC in circulation stood at $73.3 billion at quarter end, up 19%. On-chain transaction volume reached $14.8 trillion, up 151%. Circle’s share of the fiat-backed stablecoin market slipped to 27%.
Allaire said on the earnings call that “digital asset markets themselves have continued to see significant weakness.” He also said Circle’s distribution agreement with Coinbase had “renewed on its existing terms,” leaving unchanged the arrangement behind the $410 million in distribution and transaction costs the company recorded in the quarter.
Trust charter and payments network growth
Last month, Circle received final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish Circle National Trust, making it one of the first stablecoin issuers to hold a federal bank charter. The company also received a separate limited purpose trust charter from New York regulators.
The federal charter authorizes regulated digital asset custody and gives Circle a path to manage the USDC reserve itself. On the earnings call, Allaire said the infrastructure bank “becomes a way to project Circle's infrastructure into global markets for payments, for capital markets, and for use of digital dollars in corporations all around the world.”
Guidance raised
Circle Payments Network reached $14.7 billion in annualized transaction volume, up 76% quarter over quarter, with 175 financial institutions enrolled. Allaire said that number had climbed to $23 billion by July 31.
Circle also roughly doubled its full-year guidance for other revenue, raising the range to $310 million to $330 million from $150 million to $170 million. The company said part of the increase came from recognized revenue tied to the ARC token presale.