Circle has reported that it has introduced to the market Circle Agent Stack, a financial infrastructure designed for artificial intelligence (AI) agents, in addition to the promotion of its own blockchain “ARC”.
During the first quarter of 2026, Circle raised $222 million about 35 billion yen through the presale of the native token of its own blockchain “ARC.”
Agent Stack is designed to allow payments using stablecoin “USD Coin (USDC),” and comprises multiple features, such as wallet functions and micropayment functions.
Based on the report from Circle, its infrastructure will expand its financial services in terms of AI-driven and its own blockchain “ARC” in relation to the USDC issuance ecosystem.
The Launch of Four Products
One of the first products of the Circle Agent Stacks, includes the Circle CLI for the command-line feature and the Agent Wallet for autonomous wallet, says Circle.
Additionally, the Agent Marketplace, used as a platform to search for service, and the Nanopayments, a micropayment protocol, was fueled by Circle Gateway are the two other products to be launched in the market.
According to Circle, the first standard product group with AI agents as customers are the USDC holding, service search, and payment by AI agents.
Through Agent Stack, the AI agents can autonomously execute from wallet management to service usage and USDC payment without human assistance.
Meanwhile, Circle reported that Nanopayments also has an Agent Stack feature that enables transfers a minimum of $0.000001 without gas fees and is structured to have a high-frequency payment between AIs.
CEO Allea Highlights AI Agents Features
Circle announced the growing expansion of its market in which AI agents can autonomously provide services and payments through the adoption of Agent Stack.
Jeremy Allea, co-founder and CEO of Circle, highlighted that AI agents are evolving as independent economic actors. Also, he noted that traditional financial infrastructure is structured for human manipulation while Agent Stack provides autonomous AI-drive transactions.
Furthermore, AI agents have no limits of access to funds, and Agent Wallets utilizes a mechanism to manage the funds within preset permissions, spending limits, and policies, says Allea.
Strict competition in the market is expected in the financial infrastructure market, including the x402 protocol, which emphasizes the controlled AI agent payment network.
Participation in Circle’s Own Blockchain Presale
Circle reported a wide scale on its own blockchain “ARC” native token, increasing by $222 million of about 34.3 billion yen on the presale of its own blockchain in the market.
The valuation after the dilution has reached $3 billion or about 470 billion yen, and Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto a16z served as the lead investor in the presale of its own blockchain “ARC.”
Notably, significant institutional investors also participated, such as BlackRock, Apollo Funds, and ARK Invest, the exchange-operated Intercontinental Exchange, SBI group, and Standard Chartered Ventures, along with 13 institutional investors cooperating in the presale of its own blockchain.
Thus, circle places it as the first crypto firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to develop a token presale.
White Paper Highlights ARC’s Role and Token Allocation
According to Circle, ARC is a L1 blockchain for institutional finance, which is defined as structured based on the assumption of stablecoin payments and tokenized finance.
On top of that, ARC uses USDC as the native gas currency and is built to support voluminous transactions, including a built-in exchange (FX) engine and the targets for sub-second finality. ARC is also defined as a “native coordination asset” that underpins validator rewards, governance, and staking on the ARC system.
Further information on ARC’s role and token allocation was included in a white paper released on the official Arc Network blog. The document also states that Circle will occur at 25% of the total issuance of 10 billion ARC and to support validator operations base and fee income. A structure reflects allocating 60% for network participants and 15% for long-term readiness.
Circle’s Plan To Advance Agent Stack and ARC Mainnet
The regulatory development and business competition for stablecoin are processed at the same time with the CLARITY bill.
Circle outlines both the AI agent settlement area and its own L1 operation and elaborates on the direction of broadening the demand base of USDC.
Based on its Q1 financial results, USDC circulation rose by 28% year-on-year to $77 billions of about 11.93 trillion yen, while on-chain trading volume grew by 263% to $21.5 trillion, noting the broadening of USDC usage in terms of performance.
Generally, Circle’s plan for AI agent payments through the Agent Stack and the establishment of the ARC mainnet are projected to gain attention, as the stablecoin market persists to emerge and advance new competitive scales in the market.
