Circle Internet Group disclosed on May 11, 2026 that it had raised $222 million in a token presale for Arc, its own layer‑one blockchain, at a fully diluted network valuation of roughly $3 billion. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the raise, with BlackRock, Apollo and Intercontinental Exchange — the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange — among the backers.
The disclosure lands eleven months after Circle’s NYSE debut and cements a pivot from pure stablecoin issuer to full‑stack settlement infrastructure operator. Arc is positioned as a payments‑ and settlement‑focused chain with USDC as the native gas asset.
Why the composition of investors matters
The presale roster reads as a bridge between crypto‑native capital and the traditional custody, asset management and market‑infrastructure worlds. BlackRock is already the largest holder of USDC through the BUIDL fund’s cash sleeve. Apollo has spent the last two years building tokenized private credit rails, and ICE runs the exchange stack Circle itself listed on.
For a stablecoin issuer whose business model is a spread on Treasuries and whose competitive moat is regulator relationships, owning the chain those Treasuries settle on collapses two revenue lines into one.
Read‑through for the wider market
Arc arrives into a market where every large stablecoin issuer is being pushed toward proprietary rails: Tether has USA₮ on Anchorage, PayPal has PYUSD on Solana and Ethereum, and now Circle has its own L1. The competitive question shifts from “whose reserves are safer” to “whose settlement is default”.
A $3B valuation implies buyers expect Arc to route a non‑trivial share of USDC volume within 18–24 months. That will be measured in on‑chain transfer share, not in headlines.
