Arc is live on mainnet. All right. Thank you so much for being here today. It is a major milestone in the evolution of the internet itself. And for Circle, it's one of the most important days in our history. You know, more than a decade ago, we set out with a simple but radical idea that money should work the way the internet works: open, programmable, instant, global, and available to anyone, anywhere in the world.
USDC was the fruit of that vision. Over the past decade, we fought for the laws and the trust frameworks to make digital dollars legitimate. We watched stablecoins grow from a curiosity into one of the most important upgrades to the financial system in generations.
But today isn't just a milestone for Circle. Think about the moments when computing changed the world. Not when a new product shipped, but when a new platform switched on. The PC mattered because of the Windows and Mac operating systems. The internet mattered because of the web and search. The smartphone mattered because of iOS and Android. All of these computing platforms that turned technology into an economy.
Every one of those moments, the day one, on day one, it looked like a technology launch, but every one of them turned out to be the founding of a new economic era. I believe today is one of those days because ARC comes alive on the internet and with it we're switching on something the world has never had before: an open, neutral, always-on economic operating system for the internet. A new network platform that is secured and operated by the most important financial institutions on earth. Built for a new economy run by both people and machines.
This new economy, intelligent, autonomous, always-on, now has its foundational layer. Today, we launch it together.
We're living through the fastest technology acceleration in human history. Right now, AI has crossed an irreversible intelligence threshold. It's no longer a tool we operate. It is becoming highly intelligent labor that we delegate and orchestrate. Agents that research, negotiate, write code, and reconcile books. The work of the firm is itself decomposing into tasks. And those tasks are being taken up by machines.
This past July, I published a treatise called the Agentic Economy. And its central claim is one that I want to repeat here because ARC is its ultimate embodiment. The Agentic economy and the onchain economy are not two different revolutions. They are the same economy seen from different sides. Seen from two different sides.
Over the past 30 years, we built a planetary nervous system for information: the internet. What we never built was its counterpart, a native circulatory system of value. Money and contracts stayed trapped in batch files, banking hours, legacy closed networks, and mountains of offline paper process and bureaucracy.
Humans have tolerated this world. We waited two days for settlement. We accepted that money sleeps on weekends. We waited on contracts to settle and enforce in weeks or months. But machines will not tolerate this.
When intelligence becomes abundant, when billions and then hundreds of billions of AI agents are performing economic work, the velocity of money doesn't rise incrementally. It rises by multiple orders of magnitude. An agent that completes a task in 400 milliseconds cannot wait two business days to get paid. An agent coordinating a complex financial contract across borders with another agent can't wait.
And in global finance, certainty matters just as much as speed. A machine can't call the back office. When an agent transacts, final has to mean final: cryptographically, instantly, unconditionally. And the cost of using financial infrastructure should never be the most unpredictable part of the transaction.
That is programmable money. Money that is a native object of software. Money that carries logic, identity, and conditions. Money that settles with certainty in under a second for a fraction of a cent, 24 hours a day, anywhere on Earth.
The Agentic economy has created a new massive demand shock for programmable money. Already this year, thousands of paid agent services have come online and the overwhelming majority of agent-to-agent payment volume is flowing over the X402 standard using USDC. The machines have already chosen their money. What they've been waiting for is their economic operating system.
I want to step back for a moment because a lot of us here have been in this industry for a long time. Let's all just take a moment and think about the era we are leaving behind. For 15 years, crypto fought for attention. It was loud. It was speculative. It was spectacle. The spectacle era of crypto is over. The spectacle era of crypto is over.
The most important technologies in history disappear into the background. Nobody thinks about TCP/IP when they search the internet. Nobody thinks about the grid when they flip a switch. And that's what's happening right now. Crypto is becoming invisible infrastructure. And increasingly, its heaviest users won't be people at all. They'll be machines talking to machines, agents paying agents, trillions of transactions where no human ever sees a wallet or a hash. That's happening now.
And this invisible infrastructure is being adopted and encapsulated by two killer apps of crypto. Tokenization. All of the world's assets and contracts are moving on chain. Because a tokenized asset or contract is better: instant, global, programmable, composable, always-on. Tokenized assets and contracts are growing exponentially and opening up to the world.
And stablecoins, digital dollars that have become the internet's monetary base layer, with the Genius Act and regulatory frameworks breaking out all around the world and coming into force, and USDC just crossing over a hundred trillion dollars in transaction volume this past week.
Tokenized dollars, tokenized assets, autonomous intelligence, three exponential curves, all converging at once. Every one of them needs a place to run. A network with the trust of a financial market utility and the openness of the internet. That place is Arc.
Today we're going to be taking you through everything that is launching with ARC mainnet. The institutions running the network, the hundreds of partners already integrated, the developer platforms to accelerate building, and new breakthroughs coming to ARC that we've never showcased before.
The foundation of ARC are the institutions who stand behind it. Look at our founding validator cohort: BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered, Galaxy, Global Payments, Money, SBI Group, Sumitomo. These are the institutions that clear the world's securities, run the world's payment networks, and manage the world's assets. And they're not just building on this network. The companies that depend on the integrity of this infrastructure are the companies securing and operating it. That has never been true of any blockchain and it has rarely been true of any financial infrastructure in history. Global companies must be able to trust the network they're running their business on.
And ARC was designed with the truth that open networks have avoided for too long. An open network does not mean that every transaction must share every detail. Real finance needs room for private information that should not be open to everyone. Payroll, treasury, deal flow, with compliance built in, not bolted on. You'll see what that means later this afternoon. ARC is built on a simple premise: the global economic system deserves a blockchain it can trust. Today, that trust is live.
One more thing before I hand it over. Every lasting network eventually has to answer a deeper question: How will its participants coordinate? How do the institutions securing the network, the builders creating on the network, and the users depending on the network align around its long-term future? This week, we took a foundational step towards that answer.
Circle completed the genesis mint of ARC, the full initial supply of 10 billion tokens, making Circle the first publicly traded company to mint a network token. ARC token is not available today and it is planned to become available upon ARC's transition to proof of stake in 2027, with all network fees remaining payable in USDC.
PC operating systems gave us the software industry. The web gave us the information economy. Mobile platforms gave us the app economy. And AI foundation models have given us intelligence on demand. Today, the internet gets its economic operating system. Arc is launched. So, let's begin the show. Thank you.
