TREE NEWS update: Circle’s self-developed Layer 1 network Arc is set to open its public mainnet on Sept 16, 2026, following an August 2025 inception, a public testnet on Oct 28, 2025, and a $222 million institutional presale in May 2026 at a $3 billion valuation. The chain runs Malachite BFT consensus with deterministic finality of roughly 350 milliseconds and 12 founding validators including DTCC, ICE, Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock. The ARC token is not yet issued and no TGE date has been set.
Circle’s Arc L1 to Open Public Mainnet on Sept 16, 2026
AI take
Arc's significance lies less in the chain itself than in its validator set: DTCC, ICE, Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock as founding validators signal that tokenized settlement infrastructure is being built by the incumbents it would disrupt, not around them. That places Circle in direct competition with the same institutions it is courting, and makes the validator roster — not throughput — the real strategic asset. The open question is whether the ARC token's eventual distribution aligns with that institutional base or with public users, given no TGE date exists yet.
Generated by AI for reference only.
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