Circle’s (CRCL) upcoming Arc blockchain and its $222 million token presale are raising a broader question for crypto investors: should Circle still be valued mainly as a stablecoin issuer, or as an infrastructure company building the rails for digital finance?

Alongside its quarterly earnings this week, the company announced a major fundraising round for Arc ahead of a planned summer launch, valuing the network at roughly $3 billion backed by investors including a16z crypto, Apollo, BlackRock and ARK Invest.

While earnings results were mixed, the news resonated well with investors, as Circle shares surged more than 15% on Monday, suggesting the launch addresses a critical compliance gap for Wall Street.

"We have built what we believe will be one of the most institutionally-ready networks in the world,” Allaire explained during the earnings call, describing Arc as a system designed to be operated by financial institutions with the "trust required for global economic infrastructure."

While this move was cheered by the market and some analysts, including Clear Street's Owen Lau, who called Arc a "second growth engine" for the USDC issuer, there are still questions about the valuation of Circle's shares versus Arc's token, as well as rising competition.

The move also comes as Congress advances stablecoin legislation that could eventually allow banks, fintechs and payment firms to issue their own digital dollars. That prospect has led some investors to question whether stablecoins themselves may become commoditized over time.

What is Arc?

The Arc chain, in test mode since October with plans to go live this summer, is Circle’s attempt to expand its stablecoin business into a broader infrastructure layer.

During the company’s Monday earnings call, CEO Jeremy Allaire pitched Arc as an "economic operating system" designed for payments firms, asset issuers and capital markets.

"We built the highways for USDC," Allaire said on the earnings call. "Now we’re opening them to other stablecoin and real-world asset issuers."

The idea, he said, is to make stablecoins and tokenized assets easier to move, while keeping the level of control, compliance and reliability that large financial players expect. The chain is also being built to be ready for AI agents gaining ground in finance, he added.

Allaire's comments are signs of where the stablecoin industry is heading. The industry's market cap is at an all-time high, rising above $320 billion. Almost every crypto or traditional firm is either building a stablecoin or rails to service the industry, touting a more efficient, less expensive alternative to legacy systems. A16z, lead investor in Arc's fundraising, perhaps put it aptly when it said that stablecoins are becoming "one of the most important tools for global finance."

However, the VC firm noted that the underlying blockchain infrastructure remains fragmented and is largely optimized for crypto-native users rather than banks and corporations. According to a16z, this is where Arc comes in, by aiming to bridge that gap, offering fast settlement, configurable privacy and known validators, features that align more closely with institutional requirements, the firm said.

"As the world’s finance moves onchain, we believe that a handful of blockchain networks will together emerge as the new backbone of the financial system," a16z partners Ali Yahya and Noah Levine wrote. "Arc is in a strong position to become one of them," they added.

Circle shares vs Arc token

However, given Arc's token presale, questions remain about how Arc affects Circle's valuation in the long term: Why should one buy the shares if they can now buy the token?

To Clear Street's Lau, they are "two very different concepts."

He described Arc as the infrastructure layer while USDC operates as an application running on top of it. "You have one more tunnel for your apps to run on. It just means that you have more channel, more opportunity to expand your USDC down the road," Lau told CoinDesk in an interview.

Lau compared Arc to Ethereum or Solana — layer-1 blockchains that support applications, payments and tokenized assets. In a note earlier on Monday, he argued the network could reinforce USDC adoption, particularly as Circle pushes into AI-driven payments, tokenized finance and commercial settlement systems.

Still, Lau acknowledged Arc remains highly speculative, at least for now.

"It depends on the network activity," he said. "We still don’t know what apps will actually run on Arc." For now, he views Arc as "option value" rather than a tangible contributor to Circle’s business.

That caution is shared by Compass Point analyst Ed Engel, who warned investors against assigning too much value to the project before meaningful usage emerges.

“We would prefer to wait for Arc to generate meaningful transaction activity before ascribing value to ARC tokens," Engel wrote in a research note on Monday. He added that crypto venture firms have a long history of backing blockchain projects at elevated valuations, only for token prices to later decline after launch.

The economics behind Arc remains another open question.

Circle has said fees on the network can be denominated in stablecoins while still accruing value to the ARC token through validator rewards and token burns. Analysts say the structure resembles Ethereum’s model, in which network activity drives demand for the underlying token.

Lau said the $3 billion valuation attached to the presale appears credible given the caliber of the institutional investors involved. “I don’t think that’s crazy,” he said. For now, Arc may matter less for what it generates today than what it signals about Circle’s future ambitions.

'Significant competition'

The disagreement on what to buy: Token or the share, highlights a central debate now emerging around Circle and the stablecoin industry: whether owning blockchain infrastructure becomes more important as digital dollar issuance itself becomes more competitive.

On one hand, with the launch of Arc, incumbent networks would face increased competition, according to digital asset investment bank FRNT. "Incumbent networks will face significant competition as solutions such as Arc increase in maturity," the firm wrote in a note.

On the other hand, the industry is dominated by mostly Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC, and other stablecoins such as PayPal aren't gaining market share, according to Clear Street's Lau. But now, Circle adding Arc creates new competitive tensions, he added.

By launching its own blockchain, Circle is no longer just a customer of crypto infrastructure providers like Ethereum and Solana. Lau said Arc now competes directly with those networks and potentially with Coinbase’s Base blockchain as well.

While there are questions about valuation and the longer-term competitive impact, launching Arc fits a pattern in which crypto developments have increasingly shifted focus to large financial institutions and Wall Street, rather than retail users.

Tempo, incubated by payments giant Stripe and investment firm Paradigm, raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in October to launch a payments-focused blockchain. Digital Asset, developer of the Canton Network, has attracted backing from Goldman Sachs, DRW, Citadel Securities, BNY and Nasdaq, and is reportedly raising another $300 million at a $2 billion valuation.

Arc's fundraising is another example that big-money investors bet that large financial firms increasingly want blockchain infrastructure designed around how institutions actually move money — cross-border payments, treasury management, FX and tokenized assets — rather than the open, retail-first systems crypto started with. And Circle is betting on the trend by going all-in on Arc.