Arc launches as full-stack financial platform with USDC as native gas token

Circle just did something the stablecoin industry has been building toward for years: it launched its own blockchain, and it made USDC the fuel that runs it. Arc, Circle’s new Layer-1 network, went live on public mainnet on September 16, 2026, positioned not as another general-purpose chain but as what Circle calls an “Economic OS for the Internet.” This isn’t a platform trying to be everything to everyone. It’s built specifically for payments, tokenized assets, lending, and trading, and USDC is baked in at the infrastructure level from day one. What Arc actually is USDC isn’t just supported on Arc. It’s the native gas token, meaning every transaction fee on the network is denominated in dollars. Arc targets roughly one cent per transaction, and because fees are paid in USDC, that price stays predictable. The network delivers sub-second deterministic finality. It’s also EVM-compatible, so developers can port existing Ethereum-based applications without rewriting their code from scratch. Arc also connects to over 20 other blockchains out of the gate. USDC on Arc runs in two formats: a native 18-decimal version for on-chain transfers and a 6-decimal ERC-20 version for application-lay...