Today Circle announced its first quarter earnings including a $222 million token pre-sale for its Arc network at a $3 billion valuation. Backers include several traditional finance players alongside crypto and venture investors: a16z crypto, Apollo Funds, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Bullish, General Catalyst, Haun Ventures, Intercontinental Exchange, IDG Capital, Janus Henderson Investors, Marshall Wace, SBI Group, and Standard Chartered Ventures.
Putting this in context, the yet to launch blockchain is valued at $3 billion. Circle itself targeted a $5.4 billion valuation when it first unveiled its IPO last May, but the stock has since traded between $16 billion and $70 billion, settling around $30 billion today.
The Arc testnet launched in October 2025, and its mainnet is scheduled to go live this summer. Stablecoin issuer Circle says the blockchain is “designed to be the Economic OS for the internet.”
Key features of the network include deterministic settlement (settlement finality in TradFi lingo), stablecoin denominated gas, configurable privacy and institutional validators. Beyond staking and governance, ARC offers fee discounts and platform access across the stack, but the more interesting question is the underlying economics. How can you denominate gas in stablecoins but still ensure the token has value? The answer is that “fees convert to ARC at the protocol level, split between validator and staker compensation and permanent burn.” So the key question is whether gas fees are set in stablecoin values or priced according to ARC? The answer determines whether the token price rises automatically as the network gets busier, or whether it just tracks transaction volume.
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