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Stablecoin giant Circle Internet Group Inc. early Tuesday unveiled Arc, a new payments platform aimed at major money flows, including foreign exchange. The new service, part of the existing Circle Payments Network, will speed up foreign exchange while offering what the company calls “sub-second instant finality” in settlement, the company said.
The new service is set to launch “in the second half of the year,” Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s chief executive and chairman, told equity analysts during the company’s first earnings briefing since going public in early June. “We’re very excited about Arc,” he said, in part because the new service “offers configurable privacy controls, which are essential for real-world business.”
With Arc, Allaire said, Circle can realize increasing income from so-called gas fees, which are payments to miners for validating transactions on the various blockchains. “We want to underpin all stablecoin payments,” he said, hinting that more fee-based products may arrive soon. “We have a number of transaction-fee revenue sources that are emerging. A number of products we are building have transaction fees with them,” he said. Gas fees alone can range from fractions of a penny to several dollars.
The arrival of Arc comes as Circle is seeing mounting interest in stablecoins from financial institutions, according to Allaire. “We want to bring significantly more corridors [for transactions] on, that’s a big focus,” he said, but added that serving these relatively new clients presents a challenge, at least for the time being. “The number of financial institutions that want to onboard outstrips our ability to bring them on. We hope to bring significant numbers on,” he said.
Circle increasingly finds itself serving the needs of users who want to send money to others, including persons overseas. “We continue to see demand for remittances, family member to family member but also business to business,” Allaire said. “With peer-to-peer flows, we’ve grown our presence fairly considerably in the past year.” The speed and low cost of stablecoin transactions is driving this business, he added. “It’s fast and cheap” to get a payment into a bank account in another country in the local currency, he said, adding this service represents a strategic advantage for Circle. “That liquidity network is very difficult to replicate,” he noted.
Meanwhile, Interest in Circle has grown in recent weeks, stemming from both the company’s initial public offering and passage of the GENIUS Act, which President Trump signed into law July 18. The latter development for the first time sets up a federal regulatory regime for stablecoins, a move many observers expect will increase interest and usage of the digital money, particularly at major banks and other institutional clients.
Still, Allaire is unsure how much credit to give the legislation for raising awareness and usage of stablecoins, particularly Circle’s own USDC token, which has been available for nearly seven years. “It’s hard to correlate the rapid growth of USDC users in the last month or so with a legislative outcome,” he said. Still, he noted that since Circles’ June 5 IPO and the bill’s passage a month later, “we have seen an incredible amount of inbound interest from all around the world. This has been a catalytic moment for financial institutions, who say, ‘now we can play.’” That outcome has made the GENIUS Act “a catalytic tailwind” for Circle, he added.
For the June quarter, Circle reported $61 billion in volume for USDC, a 40% increase year-over-year and by itself a 27% share of the total stablecoin market, according to charts the company released early Tuesday. Meanwhile, the company reported 5.7 million digital wallets in the market, up 68%.
Revenue for the quarter came to $658 million, up 53%. The company reported negative net income of $482 million from continuing operations, compared to a positive $33 million in the same quarter last year.
