About Arc
Acme Travel records its bookings on Arc, the blockchain built by Circle, the issuer of USDC. This page says what Arc is and why it suits a record that has to be provable.
- What Arc is
- Circle's own Layer-1 blockchain, opened to the public on 16 September 2026. A standard EVM chain with the usual tooling, and four deliberate differences that matter to a booking.
- USDC is the money and the gas
- There is no separate token. Fees are quoted in dollars, smoothed so they stay predictable, and a payment that carries a full record of an agreement costs about a tenth of a cent.
- Final in under half a second
- Malachite, a Tendermint-family consensus engine run by a permissioned cohort of institutions, makes a transaction final the moment it is included. No confirmations to wait for, no reorganisations to explain to an arbitrator.
- A memo that travels with the payment
- Arc ships a built-in memo contract: one transaction can carry a 32-byte searchable id and a note alongside a payment, with the sender preserved. That is how the record's fingerprint and its address ride inside the payment itself.
- Compliance in the token
- Transfers involving a blocklisted address revert, with screening by Elliptic and TRM Labs. A payment can therefore fail for a reason that is not about money, and the record says so.
- An agent economy already deployed
- On-chain agent identity, reputation and validation registries, escrowed jobs, and micropayments over x402 batched through Circle Gateway, all live on the test network today.
Why it fits the record
A traveller's agent signs a USDC transfer authorization that anyone can submit. The one-time number inside that authorization is the fingerprint of the Agentic Transaction Record, and Arc's memo contract puts the record's address beside it. The result is one transaction, final in half a second, that a stranger can read to recover and check exactly what two agents agreed. The fingerprint is a hash, so publishing it publishes nothing about the guest, the room or the price.
Timeline
- August 2025Arc announced.
- 28 October 2025Public testnet opens; about 244 million transactions since.
- 16 September 2026Public mainnet. Founding validators include BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, ICE, Galaxy, Global Payments, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered and Sumitomo.
- Second half of 2027DTCC tokenised settlement scheduled.
