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ToggleAt the "Circle in Seoul" event held in Seoul, South Korea this week , Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Chairman of stablecoin giant Circle, delivered a speech entitled "Internet Financial System: An Unstoppable Global Movement".
After reviewing the decades-long history of the Internet's evolution from "information exchange" to "value exchange," Allaire showcased Circle's most ambitious infrastructure plan to date: a brand-new economic operating system and its underlying public blockchain: Arc Network .
Arc Network: An "operating system" specifically designed for the on-chain economy.
With the explosive growth in the adoption of compliant stablecoins such as USDC and EURC globally, Allaire defines Arc as an "Economic Operating System" with the following core characteristics:
Built for mainstream scale: Designed to support global, large-scale stablecoin payments (including stablecoins in various fiat currencies such as the US dollar, euro, and even the future Korean won).
Cutting-edge technology architecture: It has post-quantum resistance capabilities, a robust privacy protection mechanism, and provides strong transaction finality.
Balancing consortium and decentralization: Arc is currently in the testnet phase and will soon launch mainnet. It will be decentralized and jointly operated by major global financial infrastructure companies.
Explore issuing Arc network tokens
When introducing Arc Network's future roadmap, Allaire revealed the information that investors were most interested in throughout the presentation. He stated that in order to build a truly open, inclusive, and self-evolving financial system, Circle is exploring issuing its own token for the Arc payment public chain.
Allaire clearly outlined the three core visions and functions of the token:
Governance: As the Arc Network gradually becomes an important infrastructure for global economic activities, tokens will empower holders and ecosystem participants to decide on network upgrades, parameter adjustments, and protocol development directions, ensuring that the evolution of the network aligns with the common interests of the community and industry.
Incentives & Economic Alignment: Establish an effective token economics to incentivize developers, financial institutions, node operators, and end users to participate in the construction of the Arc ecosystem, allowing all participants who create value for the network to share in the dividends of the network's growth.
Transition to Proof-of-Stake: Allaire points out that the ultimate goal of launching the token is to use it as a staking asset to drive the Arc network to gradually transition to a mature Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system over time, thereby achieving deeper decentralization and network security.
Empowering the Future: AI-Driven "Agent Economy" and Nano Payment
Why does Circle need to build the Arc Network and supplement it with token economics? Allaire's answer is: to prepare for the upcoming AI agentic economy.
Allaire predicts that within the next 5 to 10 years, the vast majority of on-chain economic activities will no longer be directly operated by humans, but will be completed by autonomous AI agents. These AIs will sign smart contracts with each other, hire each other, purchase computing power or data, and conduct transactions of extremely low value but extremely high frequency.
To support this vision, Circle is developing a "nanopayment" system on the Arc network. In this system, AI agents can make instantaneous payments as low as one cent (or even one millionth of a cent). This high-frequency, minute, and fully automated machine-to-machine value exchange can only be realized on the Arc public chain, which has strong concurrency capabilities, extremely low costs, and a sound token incentive and governance mechanism.
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