Circle will open the public mainnet of its Arc blockchain on September 16, unveiling a founding validator cohort drawn almost entirely from traditional finance alongside its second-quarter results on Wednesday.

Eleven institutions—BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, and Visa—will run validators alongside Circle to secure the network. The group spans asset management, securities clearing and settlement, exchanges, payments, and banking, representing a concentration of legacy financial-infrastructure firms uncommon among blockchain validator sets. BlackRock is expected to deploy BUIDL, its tokenized money market fund that launched on Ethereum in March 2024, on Arc, while DTCC, which settles the vast majority of U.S. securities transactions, will enable tokenization of assets it custodies, though not until the second half of 2027.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire shared the announcement on X:

Circle Q2: Continued growth and profitability, growing USDC utility, liquidity, and partnerships.

OCC National Trust Bank secured. Arc mainnet launches Sept 16, with major firms joining Arc. CPN seeing rapid qtr growth.

The internet financial system is arriving.… pic.twitter.com/m7K4oG8FMx

— Jeremy Allaire - jerallaire.arc (@jerallaire) August 5, 2026

Arc is currently in private mainnet with more than 100 builders. Allaire told analysts on the company's Q2 earnings call that the testnet has processed more than half a billion transactions across nearly 3 million wallets. He described the validator lineup as "a cohort of network validators no other network can match."

Aave, Morpho, and Uniswap are among the day-one DeFi protocols on Arc, with Binance Wallet, Kraken, Ledger, and MetaMask providing wallet access. Gas fees on the network are paid in Circle's stablecoin, USDC, meaning every Arc transaction requires the token.

Q2 Financial Results

Total revenue and reserve income reached $701 million, up 7% year-over-year and slightly ahead of the previous quarter, though still below the $770 million Circle booked in the final quarter of 2025. Reserve income of $668 million—generated primarily from interest on the short-term U.S. government securities and cash holdings backing USDC—grew 5%, with the reserve return rate declining 66 basis points to 3.5%.

Net income came in at $48 million, a sharp swing from a $482 million loss a year earlier, when IPO stock compensation charges dominated the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA reached $143 million, up 8%.

USDC in circulation closed the quarter at $73.3 billion, up 19% year-over-year. On-chain transaction volume hit $14.8 trillion, up 151%. Circle's share of the fiat-backed stablecoin market slipped to 27%, a space in which Tether's USDT remains the largest token by circulation.

Speaking on the earnings call, Allaire acknowledged that "digital asset markets themselves have continued to see significant weakness." He also disclosed that Circle's distribution agreement with Coinbase has "renewed on its existing terms," leaving unchanged the arrangement behind the $410 million in distribution and transaction costs Circle recorded during the quarter.

Regulatory Charters and Updated Guidance

Last month, Circle received final approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish Circle National Trust, making it one of the first stablecoin issuers to obtain a federal bank charter. The designation places Circle under direct federal banking supervision—a regulatory status long standard for traditional depository institutions but rare among digital asset companies. The company also secured a separate limited purpose trust charter from New York regulators. The federal charter authorizes regulated digital asset custody and opens the door to Circle managing the USDC reserve itself.

Allaire said the infrastructure bank "becomes 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."

The Circle Payments Network (CPN) reached $14.7 billion in annualized transaction volume, up 76% quarter-over-quarter, with 175 financial institutions enrolled. Allaire noted that figure had climbed to $23 billion by July 31.

Circle roughly doubled its full-year guidance for other revenue, raising the range to between $310 million and $330 million from the prior $150 million to $170 million. The company attributed the increase in part to recognized revenue from the ARC token presale, indicating that Arc's native token has already generated revenue for Circle ahead of the network's public launch.