What is Arc?

Arc L1 achieves payment finality with a half-second settlement time.

“We have something called payment finality which allows for transactions to be truly final within once they're settled. settlement time is half a second.”

Arc launched with approximately 16 stablecoins on day one.

“We have 16ish stable coins launching on ARC today.”

Arc's privacy model lets users toggle any public transaction into a private one within the same wallet, mixing public and private transactions without switching custody models.

“You toggle a switch and you can take a transaction that was going to be a public transaction and make it a private transaction so you can have a mix both public and private transactions using the same wallet interface. That's unique.”

Institutions holding treasuries and RWAs cannot account for native network tokens on their balance sheets, making stablecoin-denominated gas (as on Arc) a meaningful unlock for institutional adoption.

“For companies that are transacting that are holding treasuries that are transacting in RWAs this is a very significant hurdle to cross because they don't know how to account for things like native network tokens.”

Arc uses a permissioned validator set because institutional users need to know validator identities, while keeping contract deployment fully permissionless so anyone can build without a Circle developer key.

“It is a permission validator set because for the kind of traffic that we're hoping to get in addition to like core internet crypto traffic or the new kind of traffic that we want to get. Those users want to know who the validators are. They cannot rely on unknown validators today.”

Arc (Circle's L1) launches with stablecoin gas, TEE-based private transactions, post-quantum signatures, an agent marketplace, and an agent reputation system, positioning it as settlement infrastructure for institutional and agent-driven finance.

“Over the next three months we have a very rich road map in terms of like new privacy features we have like new agent features coming out we probably add more validators to the set as like things mature on our side and so and then eventually we're planning for our proof ofstake launch as well.”

Jeremy Allaire on the missing trust layer for AI agents, compared to human identity infrastructure.

“Much like you have a social security number you have a work history you have like an ability to prove all of that. How does an agent get all of that? that infrastructure doesn't exist.”

Circle Nanopayments is designed to let agents pay each other amounts as small as one millionth of a dollar.

“We are building ways for agents to pay each other very small amounts of money like almost a millionth of a dollar using circle nanop payments.”

At ARC's project launch only about 5 million perturbed single-cell profiles existed in all published literature. ARC aims to generate 1 billion within 2 to 3 years, a roughly 200x increase.

“When we started this project, there were maybe five million >> perturbed seed cells out there in the literature. And so we're going to generate a boom.”

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and its SPARC pilot plant are worth tracking: hardware installation is nearly complete and full operation is targeted for next year, with commercial ARC plant output aimed at the early 2030s.

“It's starting to turn on now. Like plants are running, parts of it are running. It's almost all installed.”