Circle posts $865M quarter as Arc blockchain opens to 100+ partners

Circle's quarter landed ahead of the Street. The USDC issuer pulled in $865 million in revenue for Q3 2026, per Crypto Briefing, with adjusted EBITDA hitting $317 million — comfortably above the roughly $788 million analysts had penciled in. The company, listed on the NYSE as CRCL, also reaffirmed its full-year 2026 guidance in the same breath.

Two engines drove the beat. The old reliable one is reserve income: the yield Circle earns on the assets backing its dollar-pegged stablecoin. The newer one is the presale of ARC tokens, the native asset of its Arc ecosystem, which brought in about $222 million at a $3 billion valuation. Circle paired that with a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens as the network went live.

Arc's public mainnet opened on September 16, 2026, with more than 100 institutional partners and builders already on board. The marquee names include BlackRock, the DTCC and Visa. What sets Arc apart is the plumbing: transaction fees are paid in USDC itself rather than some separate, twitchy token.

That choice is the whole pitch. Circle wants Arc handling on-chain financial activity right alongside ordinary fiat transactions, aimed squarely at tokenized finance and cross-border payments. It's also a break from how the company has operated for most of its life — issuing USDC and letting it roam across other people's blockchains. Now every Arc transaction is, in a sense, a transaction in Circle's own core product.

The fine print is where the money came from. Presale proceeds are a launch-window event by definition — a token only debuts once. Reserve income stays the backbone, and those margins have been under steady pressure, which keeps USDC supply worth watching. Circulation sat at roughly $73 billion to $74 billion around the time of the earnings report and the Arc launch.

So the watchlist is concrete: how USDC circulation moves from here, how much genuine activity actually flows through Arc, and whether reserve margins stop sliding. The $3 billion ARC valuation was struck in a presale, and how the token trades once it hits the open market could color sentiment across Circle's whole ecosystem.