Catena Partners with Circle to Support Arc: Built for Agentic Finance and Commerce

Today, we're excited to announce that Circle has partnered with us to build support for agentic commerce and finance on Arc, their new Layer-1 blockchain designed specifically for payments and stablecoins. As an AI bank focused on providing financial infrastructure for AI agents, our approach is to work across a range of blockchains and legacy payment rails to address our customers' needs. However, we see the clear demand for new L1 chains that are purpose-built for payments. Arc addresses this need with the kind of foundational technology the agent economy needs.

Why Arc Matters for Agents

AI agents need to transact at machine speed with predictable costs and instant settlement. Arc delivers this through:

  • Stablecoins as Native Gas: Agents pay transaction fees directly in USDC, eliminating the complexity and volatility of managing tokens to pay gas fees. No more converting between assets just to execute a payment.

  • Deterministic Sub-Second Finality: Transactions settle instantly with certainty. Agents don't wait days for settlement or deal with probabilistic finality—they know immediately when a payment is complete.

  • Purpose-Built for Payments: Unlike general-purpose chains adapted for payments, Arc was designed from the ground up for the movement of money. This means lower costs, higher reliability, and infrastructure optimized for the transaction patterns agents will generate.

Agent-Native Money on Agent-Native Rails

We've long believed stablecoins are AI-native money—programmable, global, and operating at software speed. But even the best money needs the right rails. Legacy payment systems impose human-speed constraints, geographic restrictions, and friction incompatible with semi-autonomous agent workflows.

Arc changes this. When an agent needs to pay for API access, purchase training data, or settle a B2B invoice, it can transact directly using stablecoins without navigating traditional banking hours, currency conversions, or multi-day settlement windows.

As a new AI Bank centered on stablecoins, we're enabling a future where agents are semi-autonomous participants in the economy. Agents need a reliable, efficient, compliant, secure, and predictable financial infrastructure. Arc meets this standard.

Arc represents another critical building block for the new agentic finance stack. These new infrastructure and services, built from the ground up for AI are unlocking new opportunities for founders and developers to build innovative new products.

Building Together

We're excited to collaborate with Circle to build on Arc and create a new generation of financial services built for AI with AI.

Circle is the leader in regulated stablecoins. They are driving the adoption of USDC as a global dollar-based payment instrument. USDC has tremendous momentum in the market today. The USDC ecosystem will leap forward with the adoption of Arc.

At the same time, we’re embracing the whole ecosystem of blockchain and legacy technologies that will need to be integrated into the agent economy and the agentic finance stake. We’re excited to see more teams drive blockchain innovations, expand the potential of stablecoins, and accelerate adoption.