Circle has opened its national trust bank subsidiary ahead of the September launch of its Arc blockchain network.
The move positions Circle among a group of companies seeking trust charters to operate under the GENIUS Act, the US federal framework for stablecoin regulation.
According to the company's chief financial officer, the charter is intended to establish federal-level infrastructure before rulemaking under the GENIUS Act is finalised. The official said the trust does not immediately change Circle's day-to-day operations but is expected to provide scope for the company to expand custody services for Circle, its affiliates, and potentially third parties over time. The charter may also give Circle flexibility in how and where it issues its USDC stablecoin and manages related reserves, though the official said no changes to USDC's operations have yet been made.
In addition, Circle was granted both a national trust bank charter from the OCC earlier this month and a limited-purpose trust charter from the State of New York last week. The fintech is one of a cohort seeking trust charters from regulators to work with digital currencies under the GENIUS Act.
Arc network validators named
According to the American Banking, alongside its earnings, Circle disclosed the initial validators for Arc, an open blockchain network for institutional stablecoin use cases such as foreign exchange and cross-border settlement, first announced in 2025. Arc is currently in a private mainnet phase and is scheduled for public mainnet launch on 16 September 2026. Named validators include BlackRock, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Global Payments, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered and the Intercontinental Exchange.
Circle separately confirmed a tokenised real-world asset partnership with BlackRock, while DTCC is working with Circle on bringing tokenised securities to Arc.
Competitive positioning
Circle's chief financial officer drew a distinction between Circle and Open Standard, a recently announced consortium of more than 140 institutional partners planning to issue a blockchain-agnostic stablecoin, Open USD, later in 2026. The official noted that Open Standard resembles the Global Dollar consortium launched by Paxos Digital in 2025, and pointed to network effects as central to stablecoin adoption, noting that Visa and Mastercard have both described multi-chain strategies in their own recent earnings statements.
