The first company in history, Circle, directly issued tokens as a publicly traded company

On May 11, Circle, the issuer of the largest compliant stablecoin in the US, USDC, completed a token presale for its Arc chain.

The presale was valued at $3 billion and raised $222 million.

Of this, a16z led the investment with $75 million. Other participating institutions included BlackRock, Apollo, ICE (the parent company of the NYSE), Standard Chartered, SBI, Janus Henderson, ARK, and others—an extremely impressive lineup~

More importantly, Circle is the first company in history to run a token presale with its status as a publicly listed company.

This means that, from a regulatory perspective, the dual-track financing of “a US listed company + tokens” has already become a de facto norm.

Positioning and Core Selling Points of the Arc Chain

Arc is not positioned as a general-purpose public chain, but as stablecoin-native financial infrastructure.

At present, there are three key selling points in its publicity:

1. USDC as gas. When you transfer a transaction on Arc, you pay with stablecoins. For corporate finance departments, this is a game-changer—costs are predictable, reconciliation is simple, and quarterly financial reports can be calculated clearly.

2. Sub-second confirmation. Arc uses the Malachite consensus engine to achieve deterministic finality on the order of 780 milliseconds. Its benchmark is not Ethereum, but Visa.

3. Optional privacy. Enterprises can selectively mask sensitive transactions, while keeping them auditable. What institutions fear most—having their holdings visible to counterparties—is solved by this chain from the design level.

When you see that gas fees are paid in USDC, many longtime people in the old crypto circles probably feel uneasy, right?

Don’t worry! Arc uses a dual-token system.

Users pay fees in USDC (which looks simple and user-friendly), but the Arc protocol layer automatically converts those USDC into ARC tokens—part of it is distributed to validators and stakers, and part of it is permanently burned.

Competition in the Institutional Infrastructure Track

Nowadays, on Wall Street, few people basically believe that institutions will use Ethereum as the foundational on-chain infrastructure for future finance.

Currently, besides Circle’s Arc chain, another strong competitor for institutional adoption is widely considered to be Canton Network.

What’s interesting is that Canton Network was also just recently led by a16z.

Arc is still in the testing phase, but on the Canton chain, daily it has already completed $100 billion in US Treasury repo buybacks.

Canton Mode

Canton operates in a “closed garden” model:

Only licensed institutions can enter; transactions are private by default; and retail investors can’t even get access. Smart contracts use a proprietary language, Daml, completely isolated from the Ethereum ecosystem.

Canton believes that institutional finance does not need the openness of public blockchains—it needs privacy and regulatory compliance.

Arc Mode

Arc is an “open but institution-friendly” model:

In theory, anyone can use it, but all features are designed for institutions. EVM-compatible—Ethereum developers can migrate directly.

Arc believes that institutions want the network effects of a public chain, but they need a chain specially “seasoned” for them.

Industry Developments: Changes in Ethereum’s Core Team

On the same day Circle completed its funding, the Ethereum Foundation announced that the protocol-layer “old Merge crew” would collectively step down.

Tim Beiko, Barnabé Monnot, Alex Stokes—coordinators for all the major upgrades in the past four years, mechanism designers, and leaders of consensus-specification work—left or took leave at the same time.

The three newly appointed co-leads are more inclined toward ZK, security, and post-quantum resilience.

It can be said that this is Ethereum admitting that the development path of the past few years failed, and that it is reforming itself.

Tokenization of institutional finance is one of the biggest trends for the next 5-10 years. The question is not “whether it will happen,” but “on which chain it will happen.”

Which chain do you think it will be?