Circle’s Chandhok says stablecoins will be real money as Arc Mainnet goes live

Circle just did something banks have been talking about for years without actually doing it. On September 16, 2026, the company behind USDC launched Arc, a Layer-1 blockchain built specifically for financial markets and real-time payments, and invited some of the most powerful names in traditional finance to run it with them. BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, and Standard Chartered are among the founding validators. What Arc actually is Arc is a purpose-built blockchain assigned chain ID 5042, designed to handle dollar-denominated payments at institutional scale. Gas fees are paid in USDC, not in a native speculative token, which is a deliberate design choice that removes one of the biggest friction points for corporate treasury teams trying to use blockchain rails. The network offers sub-second deterministic finality and is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, meaning developers can port existing smart contract code without rebuilding from scratch. At genesis, Circle minted 10 billion ARC tokens. The company has not committed to any public distribution schedule for those tokens, so what role they play in the long-term network economy remains an open question. The network...