Circle is exploring a native token for Arc Network, its stablecoin-focused payment blockchain. Speaking at the “Circle in Seoul” event in South Korea, CEO and Chairman Jeremy Allaire said the token is being considered for governance, ecosystem incentives, and a transition toward Proof-of-Stake. The remark put Arc’s token model at the center of Circle’s latest infrastructure push.
Allaire described Arc as an “economic operating system” built for onchain finance rather than a general-purpose chain aimed at a narrow set of crypto apps. In his presentation, Arc was framed as infrastructure designed to handle stablecoin payments at mainstream scale, including USDC and EURC, with room for additional fiat-backed stablecoins in the future. He also said the network is already in testnet and that mainnet is coming soon, with operations to be distributed across major financial infrastructure companies globally.
Arc is being built around large-scale stablecoin settlement
On the technical side, Allaire said Arc is designed with post-quantum capabilities, privacy protections, and strong transaction finality. Those features point to a chain meant for high-volume payment activity, where low cost and reliable settlement matter more than experimentation alone. Circle’s message in Seoul was clear: Arc is supposed to function as foundational payment infrastructure for the onchain economy.
The token discussion drew the most attention because Circle laid out its intended role in unusual detail. Allaire gave three main functions. The first is governance. As Arc takes on a bigger role in economic activity, token holders and ecosystem participants would be able to influence network upgrades, parameter changes, and protocol direction. The second is incentives and economic alignment, with the token meant to attract developers, financial institutions, node operators, and end users into the network while aligning them around ecosystem growth.
The token model also points to staking and network security
The third function is tied to decentralization. Allaire said the long-term goal is to use the token as a staking asset so Arc can move over time toward a mature PoS consensus system. That places the token beyond governance alone and gives it a possible role in validator participation and network security.
Circle linked that design to what Allaire called the coming AI agent economy. He said that within the next 5 to 10 years, most onchain economic activity may be executed not by humans manually clicking through transactions but by autonomous AI agents. Those agents, in his description, would sign smart contracts with one another, hire one another, purchase compute or data, and carry out extremely small but highly frequent transactions.
Circle is positioning nano-payments as a machine-to-machine use case
To support that model, Circle is developing a nano-payment system on Arc. Allaire said this could enable streaming payments as low as $0.01, and even down to a millionth of a cent. That kind of machine-to-machine value exchange requires a network that can process large volumes at very low cost, while also relying on token-driven incentives and governance to coordinate participants.
Based on what Circle disclosed in Seoul, Arc now sits at the center of the company’s stablecoin infrastructure roadmap. Testnet status, a coming mainnet launch, distributed operation by financial infrastructure firms, and the token’s governance and staking role were all presented as parts of the same plan. Circle did not provide a launch date, token allocation details, or listing information, but Allaire’s confirmation that the company is exploring an Arc token pushed the project beyond a payment-chain concept and into a defined onchain economic framework.