GoKawiilCircle Internet Group Initial Public Offering at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.
Circle Internet Group has raised $222 million in the presale of Arc, the native token of its new blockchain, as the company looks to expand beyond its core business of issuing the USDC stablecoin, CNBC has learned.
Andreessen Horowitz served as the lead investor in the raise with a $75 million investment. Other investors include BlackRock , Apollo Funds, New York Stock Exchange parent Intercontinental Exchange , SBI Group, Janus Henderson Investors, Standard Chartered Ventures, General Catalyst, Marshall Wace, ARK Invest, IDG Capital, Haun Ventures and the crypto exchange and CoinDesk owner Bullish .
The raise gives Arc a fully diluted network valuation of $3 billion.
"[Blockchain] infrastructure is becoming as important as mobile operating systems or cloud platforms," Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire told CNBC in an exclusive interview. "We want to build an operating system that has many, many stakeholders in it ... major companies who are running the infrastructure with us and who ultimately help to govern it."
"We're becoming a broader internet platform company," Allaire added. "We're entering the operating system business and we're doing it by building this multi-stakeholder distributed model with a token, with a distributed network. But it is an operating system business. And we're also getting into the apps business."
Arc is a public blockchain designed for institutional finance. Allaire emphasized it's about more than stablecoins and payments — noting it can "run the actual economy."
"The economy is not just representations of values, it's every contract that undergirds those financial relationships ... the systems of governance that we use to govern all these economic institutions," Allaire said.
As a 25% stakeholder in Arc's initial supply of 10 billion tokens, Circle can participate in operating validator infrastructure, generating new fee revenue and earning staking income. The majority of the tokens, 60%, will go to participants who build on, use and contribute to the Arc network. The remaining 15% will be allocated to a long-term reserve.
Investors should follow transactions, asset issuance and success on the network found by the developer community, Allaire said.
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