Circle’s full-stack internet financial platform and product vision for 2026.
Over the past year, stablecoins have moved decisively deeper into the fabric of global finance, and an internet-native financial system has transitioned from theoretical to operational. Fully reserved stablecoins are being written into policy frameworks around the world, trillions of dollars move across public blockchains each year, and institutions, fintechs, and builders increasingly treat onchain infrastructure as something to run businesses on–not just to experiment with.
We explored these macro-level updates in our 2025 Year in Review: how regulation and institutional adoption are converging to bring stablecoins inside the perimeter of the financial system. In this piece, I’m taking a more product-focused view of how Circle’s platform is evolving for the next phase of this transition and what we’re building in 2026 to make this global economic transformation possible.
From a product perspective, we’ve converged on a simple way to think about Circle: an internet financial platform built on interconnected, reinforcing pillars that deliver enterprise-grade global infrastructure to enable a faster, more efficient, and trusted way to access, store, exchange, and move digital assets worldwide, designed with regulatory compliance in mind:
- Arc and Developer Infrastructure form the foundation of the platform, anchored by Arc1, an open Layer-1 blockchain designed to serve as the Economic OS for the internet, alongside interoperability services for building and operating across multiple chains.
- Digital Assets and Services, including USDC2, EURC3, USYC4, and partner-launched USDC-backed stablecoins through xReserve, provide programmable forms of money and global access to liquidity.
- Applications, including Circle Payments Network5 and StableFX6, bring these capabilities together to support internet-scale use cases across payments, FX, treasury, and capital markets.
The next phase of our work is focused on further growing and advancing our platform to deliver seamless experiences to enterprises and developers of all sizes. This means:
- Pushing Arc forward from testnet toward production with the performance, privacy, and governance that institutions expect.
- Deepening the utility and reach of our digital assets, while enhancing global on/off ramps and fortifying banking infrastructure.
- Making applications like Circle Payments Network and StableFX the easiest way for enterprises to enable stablecoin-powered money movement and related use cases.
In addition, we will continue to expand our partner and developer ecosystem to build utility and extend global scale and reach to bring the benefits of stablecoin and internet-scale finance to more markets and use cases.
Arc: The Economic OS for the internet
Arc was engineered for a clear purpose: to give the world’s businesses and financial institutions an open, trusted foundation for internet-native economic coordination, with stablecoin-based transaction fees, deterministic, sub-second finality for every transaction, and opt-in privacy features that support institutional requirements around governance, accountability, and compliance.
On October 28, 2025, Arc moved from vision to reality with the launch of its public testnet – Circle worked with early participants to optimize flows for lending, capital markets, FX, and payments at scale. In its first 90 days, Arc testnet processed more than 150 million transactions and saw close to 1.5 million transacting wallets, with transactions settling in around 0.5 seconds on average7. This early usage serves as an important proof point that the network can meet the performance and scale requirements of global technology and financial services platforms.
The focus now shifts to establishing Arc as durable, governable, and ready for meaningful, large-scale economic activity. We are working toward the milestones that will carry Arc from a high-performance testnet toward a live, production network: evolving the validator set toward greater distribution, standing up a governance model that aligns with institutional risk and compliance expectations, and integrating Arc more deeply with our digital assets layer.
Just as important, Arc is designed to serve as the underlying coordination layer for applications across the Circle platform. Over time, we expect services like Circle Payments Network and StableFX to be able to tap directly into Arc’s throughput and institutional-focused design to make it easier to orchestrate payments, FX, and capital flows. Our goal is for Arc to become the natural starting point for institutions and builders who want the benefits of onchain finance without requiring them to directly manage infrastructure complexity or governance models that are incompatible with regulated financial operations.
Interoperability and First-Class Developer Experience
Arc doesn’t live in isolation. To function as an Economic OS in practice, it needs to connect seamlessly to the broader multichain ecosystem and be approachable for developers building real products.
Arc sits alongside a suite of developer and interoperability tools designed to help builders create best-in-class apps and end-user experiences. We’re continuing to invest across three key areas:
- Moving USDC seamlessly across chains.
- Abstracting away chain complexities in end-user experiences.
- Giving developers better tools and faster paths to production.
Circle CCTP has become a core building block for transferring USDC across chains. As of December 2025, USDC is natively available on 30 blockchains, with CCTP connecting 19 of them and processing $126 billion in cumulative volume8. We advanced the capabilities of CCTP by incorporating a faster-than-finality transfer path, called Fast Transfer, and deeper crosschain composability via Hooks. Going forward, our priority is to make it an even more systemic interoperability layer for USDC so that businesses and users have access to USDC liquidity that moves safely and predictably across blockchains where it’s needed.
With the launch of Circle Gateway, we introduced a way to create unified USDC balances that are chain-abstracted, enabling apps and services to provide instant access to crosschain liquidity for trades, payments, or treasury flows without a linear increase in operational overhead. Building on that foundation, we’re deepening Gateway’s integration with Arc, CCTP, and x402, laying the groundwork for USDC-powered micropayments, machine-to-machine transactions, and agentic payment flows that can span chains without exposing users to that complexity.
We’re also investing heavily in first-class developer experience. We previewed this at the end of 2025 with the launch of Build with AI, which helps developers build faster and experiment more easily by generating code through a chatbot or connecting to Circle’s MCP server for AI-native IDEs. With the launch of App Kits, we’re introducing a suite of developer kits that unify fragmented ecosystems into a single, consistent SDK experience, empowering developers to build, ship, and scale onchain applications faster.
Together with Arc, these interoperability and developer tools will make the idea of an Economic OS more than just a concept, but rather a robust framework that combines a network, interoperability primitives, and tightly integrated tools for developers to build with.
Digital Assets: Trusted Money and Liquidity
While infrastructure is essential, it isn’t sufficient on its own. For an Economic OS to be useful, it needs trusted, programmable forms of money and liquidity that can move across ecosystems reliably.
USDC remains the world’s largest regulated9 dollar stablecoin, seeing 108% YoY circulation growth10, with growing usage across exchanges, fintechs, DeFi apps, payment providers, and enterprises worldwide. Our priority remains expanding to the chains that matter most to builders and businesses, through a regulatory-first approach while always placing clear emphasis on safety and transparency. That means deepening native support on high-impact networks, tightening integration with Arc, and making it easier for institutional users to hold, move, and program with these assets as part of their everyday operations.
Alongside our stablecoins, in 2025 we continued to grow USYC, our tokenized money market fund with $1.6B in assets under management as of January 27, 2026. USYC is an onchain yield-bearing asset offering 24/7, near-instant redemptions at scale. We brought USYC to major ecosystems like Solana and BNB Chain; in 2026, we’re focused on making USYC a more natural part of onchain treasury, collateral, and capital markets workflows, especially as builders on Arc and partner networks build more sophisticated financial applications that can benefit from tokenized cash.
xReserve extends our asset layer beyond Circle-issued stablecoins. By holding USDC in onchain reserve contracts and offering an attestation service that partner networks can rely on, xReserve allows blockchain teams to launch their own USDC-backed stablecoins that interoperate with USDC across supported chains. Going forward, we’ll work with more partners to launch stablecoins for their ecosystems through xReserve, expand the range of supported assets over time, so that liquidity can move seamlessly between USDC and blockchain-launched tokens without the fragmentation that typically comes with traditional bridging solutions.
Across USDC, EURC, USYC, and xReserve, our goal is simple: to make trusted, programmable money and liquidity available wherever builders and institutions need it, whether that’s on Arc, across the multichain ecosystem, or inside the products that sit on top of our platform.
Applications: Circle Payments Network (CPN), StableFX, and more
With infrastructure and assets in place, the final step is turning them into products that institutions and enterprises can easily use.
The third layer of Circle’s full-stack platform hosts some of the important apps for this global economic transformation, including Circle Payments Network and StableFX. Built on top of Arc and our digital assets, these apps give institutions access to a global network of banks, payment service providers (PSPs), virtual asset service providers (VASPs), and enterprises that enable fast, cost-efficient and compliant money movement powered by stablecoins.
Circle Payments Network (CPN) is a global network of partners and payment solutions that combines the strengths of traditional fiat payment rails, such as real-time domestic systems, with the programmability of stablecoins to enable near-instant money movement across use cases including fiat and crypto payouts and pay-ins, intercompany transfers, merchant acceptance, and more.
Since launching in May 2025, CPN has enrolled major financial institutions and reached billions in annualized transaction volume. Now, we’re focused on turning this early traction into a truly scaled network: expanding corridor and currency coverage, adding more payout and pay-in capabilities, and making it even easier for institutions to integrate CPN into their existing workflows - no matter where they are in their crypto journey. Our goal is for CPN to become the preferred way to coordinate global money movement, powered by stablecoins as both a payment instrument and the underlying settlement layer.
As stablecoin-powered payments continue to expand, seamless value conversion across currencies becomes essential. Circle StableFX brings this capability onchain. Launched on the Arc Testnet, StableFX allows vetted institutions to trade stablecoin FX pairs 24/7 with instant, onchain settlement. For our next phase, we’re focused on deepening StableFX’s coverage via partnerships through the Circle Partner Stablecoins program, and making StableFX easier to embed into CPN workflows and other apps.
Across both CPN and StableFX, the guiding principle remains the same: to maximize the capabilities of the Circle platform—Arc’s performance, the trust and reach of our digital assets, and the interoperability and tools we’ve built around them—and package them into products that enterprises can use directly, without needing to manage onchain complexity themselves.
Advancing Toward an Internet Financial System
A year ago, we spoke about stablecoins finding product-market fit and about the early stages of an internet financial system. 2025 reinforced that thesis and sharpened our direction.
In 2026, our focus is on turning momentum into durable infrastructure. We’ll continue advancing Arc and Developer Infrastructure so builders can rely on an enterprise-grade blockchain network, interoperability primitives, and composable tooling as a robust and integrated foundation. We’ll deepen the role of Digital Assets like USDC, EURC, USYC, and partner-launched stablecoins as trusted, programmable money. And we’ll scale Applications like Circle Payments Network and StableFX so enterprises can adopt stablecoin-powered payments and FX through familiar, production-ready products, rather than building and operating the underlying infrastructure themselves.
All of this is part of a single trajectory: building toward a future where value moves with the same openness, reliability, determinism, and speed as information. The future of money is being shaped by a wide community: developers shipping new protocols and applications, institutions rethinking their operating models, and users who increasingly expect money to move more efficiently. Together, we can build an economic future that is faster, safer, more open, more inclusive, and reflective of the needs of a truly global, connected economy.
1. Arc testnet is offered by Circle Technology Services, LLC (“CTS”). CTS is a software provider and does not provide regulated financial or advisory services. You are solely responsible for services you provide to users, including obtaining any necessary licenses or approvals and otherwise complying with applicable laws.
Arc has not been reviewed or approved by the New York State Department of Financial Services.
The product features described in these materials are for informational purposes only. All product features may be modified, delayed, or cancelled without prior notice, at any time and at the sole discretion of Circle Technology Services, LLC. Nothing herein constitutes a commitment, warranty, guarantee or investment advice.
2. USDC is issued by regulated affiliates of Circle. See Circle’s list of regulatory authorizations.
3. EURC is issued by regulated affiliates of Circle. See Circle’s list of regulatory authorizations.4. USYC is a digital asset token. Each USYC token serves as a digital representation of a share of the Hashnote International Short Duration Fund Ltd. (the “Fund”), a Cayman Islands registered mutual fund. The Fund has appointed Circle International Bermuda Limited (“CIBL”), a Bermuda Monetary Authority licensed digital asset business, as its token administrator, responsible for the management of USYC on behalf of the Fund. As used herein, the term “near-instant” and “always” is intended to signify that, under ordinary operating conditions, redemption requests are filled on a near-real-time basis, subject to factors including, without limitation, blockchain network congestion and the Fund’s then-current liquidity position.
Shares of the Fund and USYC are only available to non-U.S. Persons, as defined under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Additional eligibility restrictions may apply. The information provided herein is solely for educational and informational purposes and should not be construed as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, financial instrument, or other product.
5. Circle Technology Services, LLC (CTS) is the operator of Circle Payments Network (CPN) and offers products and services to financial institutions that participate in CPN to facilitate their CPN access and integration. CPN connects participating financial institutions around the world, with CTS serving as the technology service provider to participating financial institutions. While CTS does not hold funds or manage accounts on behalf of customers, we enable the global ecosystem of participating financial institutions to connect directly with each other, communicate securely, and settle directly with each other. CTS is not a party to transactions between participating financial institutions facilitated by CPN who use CPN to execute transactions at their own risk. Use of CPN is subject to the CPN Rules and the CPN Participation Agreement between CTS and a participating financial institution.
6. StableFX is offered by Circle Technology Services, LLC (“CTS”). CTS is a software provider and does not provide regulated financial or advisory services. You are solely responsible for services you provide to users, including obtaining any necessary licenses or approvals and otherwise complying with applicable laws. StableFX is a collection of API and on-chain smart contracts that enable data sharing between counterparties to a transaction without intermediation by CTS. CTS’s role is limited to broadcasting information between the relevant parties and to the on-chain smart contract that enables settlement directly between the relevant parties. CTS does not accept or transmit digital assets on behalf of StableFX users. The product features described in these materials are for informational purposes only. All product features may be modified, delayed, or cancelled without prior notice, at any time and at the sole discretion of Circle Technology Services, LLC. Nothing herein constitutes a commitment, warranty, guarantee or investment advice.
7. Arc Testnet Stats, available at https://testnet.arcscan.app/stats, as of January 27, 2026
8. Company data as of December 31, 2025
9. USDC is issued by regulated affiliates of Circle. See Circle’s list of regulatory authorizations.
10. Company data as of September 30, 2025
