Circle Internet Group has raised $222 million in the presale of Arc, the native token of its new blockchain, as the company looks to expand beyond its core business of issuing the USDC stablecoin, CNBC has learned.
Andreessen Horowitz served as the lead investor in the raise with a $75 million investment. Other investors include BlackRock, Apollo Funds, New York Stock Exchange parent Intercontinental Exchange, SBI Group, Janus Henderson Investors, Standard Chartered Ventures, General Catalyst, Marshall Wace, ARK Invest, IDG Capital, Haun Ventures and the crypto exchange and CoinDesk owner Bullish.
The raise gives Arc a fully dilutednetwork valuation of $3 billion.
“[Blockchain] infrastructure is becoming as important as mobile operating systems or cloud platforms,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire told CNBC in an exclusive interview. “We want to build an operating system that has many, many stakeholders in it … major companies who are running the infrastructure with us and who ultimately help to govern it.”
“We’re becoming a broader internet platform company,” Allaire added. “We’re entering the operating system business and we’re doing it by building this multi-stakeholder distributed model with a token, with a distributed network. But it is an operating system business. And we’re also getting into the apps business.”
Arc is a public blockchain designed for institutional finance. Allaire emphasized it’s about more than stablecoins and payments — noting it can “run the actual economy.”
“The economy is not just representations of values, it’s every contract that undergirds those financial relationships … the systems of governance that we use to govern all these economic institutions,” Allaire said.
As a 25% stakeholder in Arc’s initial supply of 10 billion tokens, Circle can participate in operating validator infrastructure, generating new fee revenue and earning staking income. The majority of the tokens, 60%, will go to participants who build on, use and contribute to the Arc network. The remaining 15% will be allocated to a long-term reserve.
Investors should follow transactions, asset issuance and success on the network found by the developer community, Allaire said.
He added that the economy is becoming increasingly machine-operated, with AI agents handling more of the operational and contractual work currently managed by humans.
“We’re entering this era where software machines will power the economic system,” he said. “Software will do most of the work — that is what AI agents represent.”
The company also unveiled a set of services and tools designed to help developers build AI agents that can manage transactions, access online services and make payments using USDC.
Positioning for a more competitive market
Circle’s ambitions with Arc reflect the existential shift other crypto firms are facing: They need to evolve beyond the businesses that were built in crypto’s early days around the speculative cycles of cryptocurrencies, and toward more durable businesses with steadier and more diversified revenue.
“While USDC has become the trusted digital dollar for banks, corporations, and financial
institutions seeking the speed of crypto without its volatility, there remains a problem. The internet infrastructure which USDC runs on today wasn’t built with big institutions in mind. It was built for individuals and crypto enthusiasts. That’s where Arc comes in,” a16z crypto wrote in a blog post Monday morning.
If Arc is successful, it could allow Circle to own more of the infrastructure its flagship USDC stablecoin runs on. Today, USDC depends heavily on networks like Ethereum and Solana for settlement and distribution partners like Coinbase.
The initiative is as much about playing defense as it is about growth. While regulation supporting stablecoins legitimizes them – including the GENIUS Act signed into law last year and the STABLE Act, which is set to get an initial vote this week in the Senate Banking Committee – some investors worry banks and fintechs may launch their own competing dollar tokens, removing the need for a third-party issuer.
The on-chain capital raise
Circle is the first publicly listed company to conduct a token presale – an early sale of digital tokens before a blockchain project officially launches.
Crypto companies like token sales for their ability to raise large amounts of capital and build an early user community. They are frequently likened to IPOs since both represent public-facing fundraising mechanisms that result in a transferable financial interest.
Also known as “initial coin offerings,” or ICOs, token sales became notorious for their role in fueling the 2017 crypto peak – when the market grew so quickly that projects launched with little oversight, leading to some high-profile failures and scams.
The landscape has shifted significantly since then. Under the Trump administration’s more crypto-friendly regulatory posture, the Securities and Exchange Commission is increasingly focused on establishing frameworks for compliant tokenized securities and on-chain capital formation, creating conditions that could encourage the return of ICO-style fundraising in a more mature and sustainable structure.
“It is a major shift in how stakeholders can participate in the growth of networks,” Allaire said. “Every company in the world, over time, will be tokenized, meaning your shares will be tokens … [and] you will use digital tokens as mechanisms of engagement with your customers and stakeholders.”
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