Circle launches Arc mainnet with BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard and DTCC among founding validators; over 190 institutions building on the network; edgeX goes live with 24/7 FX perpetuals and 150+ markets; Paribu opens USDC deposits/withdrawals on Arc day one; Morpho live as credit infrastructure; 10B ARC tokens minted

Circle's Arc mainnet went live on September 16, 2026, with gas and settlement denominated in USDC, and BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard and DTCC are among the network's founding validators. More than 190 institutions and ecosystem participants are building on the network, according to a desk report. edgeX launched on Arc mainnet with 24/7 FX perpetuals and more than 150 perpetual markets across stocks, commodities and crypto, settling natively in USDC. Turkish exchange Paribu said it is among the launch partners in Turkey and opened USDC deposits and withdrawals over Arc from day one. Morpho is now live on Arc as its credit infrastructure. Contrary to the whitepaper's earlier plan to leave ARC unreleased, 10 billion ARC tokens have been minted, with no public launch of the tokens yet decided. A memecoin launchpad launched alongside the mainnet, using USDC bonding curves with liquidity migrating to a Uniswap V3 pool after graduation. First-day activity was heavy: about 9.1M transactions at an average fee of 0.02 USDC and $79.8M in DEX trading volume, with $ARGUS ($24.3M) and $TOLLY ($10.2M) the most traded launchpad tokens; $ARGUS rose from $2.3M to $33M, $TOLLY from $1.3M to $24M and $WARP from $400k to $1M, with $LIFT trading at an $8.3M market cap. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire called Arc "more consequential" than USDC. The launch follows 10 months of testnet, which since October 2025 ran 3.43M real wallets, 48.3M contracts deployed, 10.9M tokens created and 42.2M stablecoin transfers.

Detected & updated continuously · Source: Nebula