Circle: USDC and the Arc Blockchain

Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville found Circle Internet Financial in Boston, initially as a bitcoin payments and consumer wallet startup backed by Jim Breyer and Accel. The company later pivots from consumer bitcoin payments toward regulated digital-dollar infrastructure.

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Circle and Coinbase announce USDC, a fully reserved US dollar stablecoin, launching it through the jointly governed Centre Consortium. USDC grows into the second-largest stablecoin and becomes Circle's core business.

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Circle dissolves the Centre Consortium and assumes sole governance of USDC, ending the joint arrangement with Coinbase that had run the stablecoin since 2018. Coinbase retains a residual economic interest tied to USDC held on its platform.

Circle Internet Group lists on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker CRCL, pricing its upsized IPO at $31 per share and raising roughly $1.1 billion. The stock closes the first day up about 168%, valuing the company near $18 billion — the first major pure-play stablecoin issuer to go public.

Location: New York, New York

President Trump signs the GENIUS Act (S. 1582) into law, creating the first federal regulatory regime for US payment stablecoins: full reserve backing, monthly disclosure requirements, and licensed-issuer rules. Circle, as the largest US-headquartered issuer, is a direct beneficiary of the clarified regime.

Location: Washington, D.C.

Circle announces Arc, an enterprise-grade Layer-1 blockchain using USDC as its native gas asset, with a founding validator cohort of BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, and Visa — plus more than 100 ecosystem builders on the private mainnet.

Location: New York, New York

Circle launches Arc's public mainnet one day after the US Senate fails to invoke cloture on the CLARITY Act market-structure bill. Founding validators go live with roughly $649 million of USDC on-chain at launch, and Morpho lending backed by BTC collateral is live from day one. Circle positions Arc as an 'economic operating system for the internet' targeting institutional finance.