Circle Sets Sept. 16 Launch for Arc Blockchain With Wall Street Giants as Validators, Reports Q2 Profit

Stablecoin issuer Circle will launch the public mainnet for its Arc blockchain on September 16, enlisting major global financial institutions including BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation to secure the network as founding validators.

The institutional backing comes alongside Circle’s second-quarter financial results, which showed a return to profitability with net income of $48 million, compared with a $482 million loss in the same period last year when stock-based compensation costs linked to its initial public offering weighed on earnings.

The 11-member institutional validator cohort for Arc also includes Intercontinental Exchange, Standard Chartered, Global Payments, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Sumitomo Corporation, and Galaxy. Circle will operate a node alongside the group. Asset manager BlackRock plans to deploy its tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, on the network, while the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation intends to enable asset custody tokenization on Arc in the second half of 2027. Transaction fees on the network will be settled directly in USDC.

“Arc features a cohort of network validators no other network can match,” Circle Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Allaire told analysts on the company’s earnings call. He added that Arc’s testnet has processed more than 500 million transactions across nearly 3 million digital wallets. Decentralized finance protocols Aave, Morpho, and Uniswap are set to integrate on day one, with wallet support provided by Binance Wallet, Kraken, Ledger, and MetaMask.

Circle’s second-quarter revenue and reserve income rose 7% year-over-year to $701 million. Reserve income contributed $668 million, up 5%, despite a 66-basis-point drop in the reserve return rate to 3.5%. Adjusted EBITDA reached $143 million, representing an 8% increase from the prior-year period.

Circulation of the firm’s USDC stablecoin grew 19% to $73.3 billion at the end of the quarter, while total on-chain transaction volume jumped 151% to $14.8 trillion. Despite the circulation growth, Circle’s market share in the fiat-backed stablecoin sector slipped to 27%, facing persistent competition from Tether’s USDT.

Jeremy Allaire noted that digital asset markets have experienced “significant weakness” in recent months. The company also confirmed it renewed its distribution agreement with crypto exchange Coinbase on existing terms, booking $410 million in distribution and transaction costs during the quarter. Circle raised its full-year guidance for non-reserve revenue to between $310 million and $330 million, up from its previous target of $150 million to $170 million, citing recognized revenue from presales of the ARC token.

The blockchain rollout follows key regulatory milestones, including final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Circle National Trust, making it one of the first digital asset firms to secure a national bank charter. Circle also obtained a limited purpose trust charter from New York financial regulators, allowing the company to directly manage its USDC reserves and provide regulated custody services. Jeremy Allaire said the federal banking charter acts as “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.”

Annualized transaction volume on the Circle Payments Network surged 76% quarter-over-quarter to $14.7 billion across 175 enrolled financial institutions, expanding further to reach $23 billion by July 31.