Circle Secures $222 Million From New Crypto Token Presale
Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has launched a new blockchain network and raised $222 million through the Circle Arc token presale, a move that signals the company is done playing just one position in the crypto market.
The Arc network is Circle’s answer to a gap it says has existed for years: blockchain infrastructure built for retail and crypto enthusiasts, not for the banks, corporations, and treasury teams that need to move billions quickly and compliantly. The Circle Arc token presale distributed 10 billion tokens, giving Arc a network valuation of $3 billion at launch.
Andreessen Horowitz led the round with a $75 million contribution. As a16z crypto partners Ali Yahya and Noah Levine explained in a blog post, USDC solved the volatility problem for institutions, but the underlying infrastructure it runs on “wasn’t built with big institutions in mind.” That’s the gap Arc is designed to close. Other investors in the Circle Arc token presale include BlackRock, Apollo Funds, Intercontinental Exchange, SBI Group, Janus Henderson Investors, Standard Chartered Ventures, General Catalyst, Marshall Wace, ARK Invest, IDG Capital, Haun Ventures, and Bullish, the owner of CoinDesk.
On the token distribution side, Circle holds 25% of the initial Arc supply. Sixty percent goes to users who build on, use, and contribute to the network, while the remaining 15% sits in long-term reserves.
Arc’s practical pitch is straightforward: transactions settle almost instantly, privacy settings are adjustable, and the network is operated by approved institutional players rather than anonymous validators. That last point matters a great deal for compliance-conscious finance teams who would otherwise never touch a public blockchain.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire told CNBC that he sees blockchain infrastructure becoming “as important as mobile operating systems or cloud platforms,” adding that the goal is to build “an operating system that has many, many stakeholders in it.” That’s a significant framing shift, Circle is no longer positioning itself just as a stablecoin issuer, but as foundational financial infrastructure.
Alongside the Circle Arc token presale announcement, the company also unveiled the Circle Agent Stack, a chain-agnostic open infrastructure designed for what it calls the “agentic economy.” The stack includes Agent Wallets for controlled AI agent access to USDC and ERC-20 tokens, an Agent Marketplace for discovering agentic services, and a Circle Command Line Interface for executing financial actions through natural language.
Together, these launches sketch out a future where autonomous AI agents and institutional players transact on the same blockchain rails Circle is now building. With USDC already commanding a market cap of over $77 billion, Circle is bringing real network effects to Arc from day one, an advantage most new blockchain projects simply don’t have.
