Visa, Mastercard & BlackRock Join Circle's New Arc Blockchain

Circle brings in 11 major financial firms to help run its Arc blockchain, launching September 16, while posting strong quarterly profits.

Big names from traditional finance are jumping into the world of blockchain, and that's a major deal.

Circle — the company behind USDC, a stablecoin (a type of digital coin designed to always stay worth $1) — is launching a new blockchain called Arc on September 16. A blockchain is basically a digital record-keeping system that many computers share and verify together.

To help run and secure Arc, Circle recruited 11 heavyweight institutions to act as "validators" (the participants that check and approve transactions on the network). These include:

Visa and Mastercard (global payment giants)
BlackRock (the world's largest asset manager)
Standard Chartered, ICE, DTCC, MoneyGram, Galaxy, and others

BlackRock plans to put its tokenized money market fund (a traditional investment turned into a digital token) onto Arc. On the network, transaction fees — called gas — will be paid using USDC.

Circle's recent financial results were strong:

Total revenue and reserve income: $701 million (up 7% from a year ago)
Net income (profit after costs): $48 million — a big turnaround from a $482 million loss a year earlier
USDC in circulation: $73.3 billion (up 19%)
On-chain transaction volume: $14.8 trillion (up 151%)

Circle also achieved a major regulatory milestone. It won approval to create a national trust bank — meaning it now has an official federal banking license (charter). This lets Circle safely store digital assets and manage the money backing USDC itself.

CEO Jeremy Allaire called the group of validators "a cohort no other network can match," saying the goal is to build an "internet financial system" for global payments.

The bottom line: When major, trusted financial companies like Visa and BlackRock get involved in a crypto project, it signals that blockchain technology is moving closer to everyday, mainstream finance.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://decrypt.co/374961/circle-taps-visa-mastercard-and-blackrock-as-validators-for-september-arc-launch