a16z to Invest $75 Million in Circle’s Arc, Calls It Potential Blockchain OS for Institutions

Source

Minseung Kang

Summary

Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, said it will invest $75 million in tokens of Arc, Circle’s new blockchain project.
Arc is an EVM-compatible blockchain with native support for USDC and is designed to serve as an Economic OS for corporate treasury teams.
More than 200 partners, including Goldman Sachs, Visa and Mastercard, took part in Arc’s design, and a16z said the project is well positioned to become a foundation for the on-chain financial system.

Forecast Trend Report by Period

Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, said it will invest $75 million in Arc, Circle’s new blockchain project.

In a joint post published on a16z’s website on May 11, Ali Yahya and Noah Levin said the firm will purchase $75 million of Arc tokens and work with Circle to help build the network.

a16z said stablecoins are rapidly becoming part of global financial infrastructure. Annual stablecoin transaction volume reached $9 trillion last year, a level comparable to Visa and PayPal. The supply of dollar-based stablecoins now exceeds $270 billion.

USDC alone has about $79 billion in circulation across more than 30 blockchains, according to the post. It added that a significant share of cross-chain transfers is handled through Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, or CCTP.

The venture firm said the blockchain infrastructure that currently supports USDC was not built with large institutions in mind. It presented Arc as an alternative.

Arc is an open, Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain designed to serve as an “Economic OS” for corporate treasury teams managing and settling assets in dollar terms. Payments are completed in less than a second. The network is also designed so transaction data can be selectively disclosed to auditors and regulators through a configurable privacy framework.

Arc will support USDC natively at launch, the post said. More than 200 partners, including Goldman Sachs, Visa and Mastercard, participated in the design process. The group also includes companies in decentralized finance, payments, fintech and asset management.

As global finance moves on-chain, a small number of blockchain networks will underpin the new financial system, a16z wrote. It said Arc is in a strong position to be one of them.