Circle

Circle Agent Marketplace now supports services on Arc, letting agents search the live web, access real-time market data, and enrich leads with people and company intelligence directly from the marketplace. Services are pay-per-call in USDC.

The expansion brings the marketplace's pay-in-USDC services to Circle's institutional mainnet, following its recent additions of GTM and creative/inference service categories.

Circle Foundation is supporting two initiatives led by the UNDP and the World Food Programme (WFP) to advance digital payments and financial infrastructure for development and humanitarian action. The announcement extends the Foundation's international grantmaking beyond its inaugural support for the UN's Digital Hub of Treasury Solutions (DHoTS), which UNDP also participates in.

• Circle Foundation's UN support is part of a push to modernize humanitarian and development money movement, including work toward regulated-stablecoin-based payments for aid programs.
• The UN system moves an estimated $38B in humanitarian funds annually over legacy financial rails, which Circle Foundation's grants aim to help modernize.

Circle has chosen GetLiquid as a Circle Grant recipient. GetLiquid is bringing private credit onchain, and the grant supports its work building infrastructure around tokenized private credit within the Circle ecosystem.

Circle has funded a $50,000 prize inside the Build with Gemini XPRIZE for the best agent built on Circle Agent Stack that moves real USDC with no humans in the payment path. 190 teams entered the competition.

Circle promotes the XPRIZE event in downtown Los Angeles, alongside 1,500 builders, founders, and investors, in partnership with @moonshots_pod. The prize is the latest Circle initiative aimed at spurring agentic payments and autonomous, no-human-in-the-loop USDC transactions.

Circle and Alpen Labs are bringing USDC and CCTP to the first bitcoin-anchored chain supported by Circle. Alpen announced that Circle-issued dollar stablecoins will come to Bitcoin settlement rails, marking a step toward connecting Circle's stablecoin and crosschain infrastructure with Bitcoin-based settlement.

• Alpen Labs building the BTC-anchored chain, with USDC and CCTP on board
• Extends Circle's stablecoin rails into Bitcoin's settlement layer

Circle has launched Interop on Arc, the connectivity layer that brings its crosschain stack into the Arc mainnet. CCTP now handles native crosschain transfers for USDC, EURC, and cirBTC, with Fast Transfer offering sub-10-second moves on supported Arc routes and preferential pricing on routes involving Arc.

Gateway coordinates unified balances across chains, with support for additional assets like EURC and cirBTC planned over time, while Bridge Kit supports expanded multi-asset workflows for developers. Forwarding Service relays destination-chain transactions without users holding gas there, and issuers can bring third-party tokens crosschain via wrapping or launch new multichain assets with the Crosschain Token Standard (CTS).

• CCTP transfers USDC, EURC, and cirBTC natively from Day 1
• Gateway and Bridge Kit extend multi-asset and unified-balance workflows
• Positions Arc as a crosschain liquidity hub for supported assets

Circle Chief Strategy Officer Dante Disparte joined FINTECH TV live from the NYSE, describing Arc as an institutional blockchain built for privacy, scale, and the agentic economy. He reiterated Circle's intent to acquire Tazapay, framing it as a way to extend the Circle Payments Network with compliant on/off ramps around the world.

The appearance is the second major media interview for Disparte in as many days, following his Bloomberg Crypto discussion of the CLARITY Act, Arc, and the Tazapay deal. It underscores Circle's push to position Arc and its payments infrastructure for institutional and agent-driven use cases.