Circle, issuer of the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC that has become the dominant currency for agentic payments, went live with its own blockchain on Wednesday, aiming to capitalize on its early lead in the white-hot arena of developing financial and commercial infrastructure for the AI era.

The launch puts Circle into competition with Coinbase-sponsored Base and Stripe-incubated Tempo, which have been vying for traffic from AI agents. Many analysts are predicting that blockchain rails could prove far better suited to handle AI-related payments than the traditional banking system, so the ultimate prize could be far greater than the current trickle of transactions by early users.

"The agentic economy and the onchain economy are not two different revolutions," Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said in a press release. "They are the same economy seen from two sides, and both need infrastructure that never closes, settles in under a second, and is trusted by the institutions that anchor the global financial system."

The blockchain launch will be closely watched since Circle's USDC represented 99.3% of x402 settlement volume as of July. Analysts including Shoal Research have noted that the dominance does not guarantee Circle will ultimately control where payments clear, as DeAI News reported in August.

Notably, Coinbase engineers developed x402, and it is now an open standard managed under the open-source software support group Linux Foundation; and Coinbase has been promoting Base for agentic transactions.

Banks as validators

The launch builds on Circle’s May introduction of Agent Stack, including wallets and a marketplace for discovering services. The company noted that its Arc Studio comes with a coding agent to help developers generate applications and smart contracts.

While Circle's blockchain purports to be compatible with EVM, the ubiquitous programming standard set by the Ethereum blockchain, it comes with a key difference: Gas, or transaction fees, will bepaid in USDC instead of Ethererum's ETH tokens or another cryptocurrency that isn't pegged to the dollar.

Circle positioned the choice as making the fees less volatile in price when compared with the U.S. dollar.

Another key difference from Ethereum and other open-governance blockchains is that Circle hand-selected a cadre of giant banks and institutions to serve as validators for the network – ostensibly pitched as a way of gaining the trust of big corporations and users who are not crypto-savvy.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is a securities clearinghouse dominated by giant global banks including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

According to the press release:

Along with Circle, Arc will have a phased rollout from the founding validator cohort that includes BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa, and Worldpay (now Global Payments). The institutions that clear the world’s securities, run its payment rails, and manage its capital are not simply connecting to Arc; they will participate in the operation of the network itself, securing a public blockchain built to meet institutional needs. 

HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: Codex drafted this story using a skill designed to create story drafts based on press releases. I used the Distro Publisher MCP server to file the story to DistroVerse, our web app, where I used the built-in story-editing interface to check the facts and (in this case) make substantial edits.