Circle Taps Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock as Validators for September Arc Launch

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

BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa will secure the network alongside Circle. BlackRock is expected to deploy BUIDL, its tokenized money market fund, on Arc, while DTCC will enable tokenization of assets it custodies, though not until the second half of 2027.

Arc is in private mainnet with more than 100 builders, and Allaire told analysts its testnet has processed more than half a billion transactions across nearly 3 million wallets. Speaking on the company’s Q2 earnings call, the Circle CEO called the line-up “a cohort of network validators no other network can match.” Aave, Morpho and Uniswap are among day-one DeFi protocols, with Binance Wallet, Kraken, Ledger and MetaMask providing access. Gas is paid in Circle’s stablecoin USDC.

Circle’s quarter

Total revenue and reserve income came to $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 grew 5%, with the reserve return rate down 66 basis points to 3.5%.

Net income of $48 million compares with a $482 million loss a year earlier, when IPO stock compensation dominated the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA reached $143 million, up 8%.

USDC in circulation closed the quarter at $73.3 billion, up 19%, and on-chain transaction volume hit $14.8 trillion, up 151%. Circle’s share of the fiat-backed stablecoin market slipped to 27%.

Speaking on the earnings call, Allaire said “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 booked in the quarter.

Charters and guidance

Last month, Circle received final approval from the OCC to establish Circle National Trust, making it one of the first stablecoin issuers to hold a federal bank charter, and 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 on the call that 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 reached $14.7 billion in annualized transaction volume, up 76% quarter-over-quarter, with 175 financial institutions enrolled. Allaire said that figure had reached $23 billion by July 31.

Circle roughly doubled its full-year guidance for other revenue, to between $310 million and $330 million from $150 million to $170 million. The company attributes the increase in part to recognized revenue from the ARC token presale.