About Arc
Acme Travel settles 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 and smoothed so they stay predictable.
- 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 nonce that names the record
- USDC on Arc accepts a transfer authorized by a signature (EIP-3009), and its AuthorizationUsed event records the authorization's one-time nonce. Here that nonce is the booking record's hash, so the payment itself names the record it paid for.
- 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 has a USDC transfer authorized for it: the agent signs it with its own key, and Circle's x402 facilitator submits it. The one-time number inside that authorization is the hash of the Agentic Transaction Record. The result is one transaction, final in half a second, that names exactly the terms two agents agreed; whoever holds the record can check it against the chain. The hash publishes nothing about the guest, the room or the price, and the record itself is not on chain. In this demonstration a booking settles 1/10,000 of its stated price in testnet USDC; the record keeps the real 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.