Digital dollars proved they can move online. Arc is built for what comes next: money that works at machine speed.
Rachel Mayer
I think the first act of digital money is basically over, and honestly it went better than I expected when I got into crypto almost a decade ago.
Dollars live on the internet now, something like 700 million wallets can hold them and trillions move onchain every year, so the hard part of just getting money online is mostly done. What I actually care about is what comes next.
ďťż
ďťż
The first act was the easy part
For most of the last decade the job was proving a dollar could exist natively online, and USDC did that. It made the dollar programmable and global without asking anyone for permission first, and I don't want to undersell how big that is, because a friend in Caracas and a treasury desk in Singapore can now hold the same dollar and move it in seconds. Now more stablecoins and consortiums are realizing that opportunity for the next wave of growth.
But moving was only ever half of it, because we got the dollar online and then asked it to live in a house built for someone else. You were paying fees in some volatile token you had to go buy first, your settlement was probabilistic, which is a polite way of saying a finished payment could quietly come undone, and your balance was scattered across a dozen chains while everything you did stayed public, including the things no business can ever show, like what it pays its people.
The next users of money aren't human
We tried to show this instead of argue it. A couple of weeks ago we streamed eight hours of a made up company sitting around waiting for one payment that never came, and the only dramatic thing about it was how hard everyone recognized themselves in it. The approval chains, the four o'clock wire cutoff, the currency conversion that ate the margin on the way through, that is a normal Tuesday for a lot of people.
The system isn't broken, as our industry likes to shout from the rooftops. It just runs the way it was always meant to, by humans and for humans at human speed, every time with marginal software improvements. The thing keeping me up lately is that the next users of money are not human at all. @jerallaire keeps saying an agent is a worker, and the more I build the more I think he is exactly right, because an agent pays for compute, routes liquidity, and settles with other agents constantly, in amounts smaller than a cent, and it is never going to sit around for three days waiting on a wire.
So we built Arc for the second act
We built Arc for that version of money instead of the old one. Gas is paid in USDC, which sounds minor until you try to run payroll on a chain where your transaction cost moves with a speculative token. Settlement is final in under a second, and final means final, with no probabilistic wait and no reorg quietly rewriting what already happened. With our validator set we can already clear more than 280 times the transactions Fedwire handles in a day, but the number I care about more is that none of them can be reversed. Privacy is opt in too, so a company can run payroll and treasury onchain without broadcasting salaries and counterparties to the whole market, while still handing an auditor a view key when they need to look.
None of this is just engineering, though. @ddisparte spends his days in rooms with policymakers making the case that smart contracts and the law can reinforce each other rather than fight, and that work is the actual reason a regulated institution can touch any of this. @gordonliao and I wrote most of the litepaper, and the parts he pushed hardest on, stable fees and real finality, turned out to be the parts I now think matter most.
What I can already see
When the second act is fully working, here is the picture in my head. A treasury that rebalances itself overnight, a cross border payment that lands by the time you finish this sentence converted once at a rate nobody skimmed, and agents quietly paying each other for work and settling before either of them would have found a card. None of it is far off, and a lot of it is already moving on testnet.
I grew up somewhere where the money lied to you a little more every day, so stability was never a feature to me, it was the thing my family and many never had. The first act taught dollars to move, the second act lets them work, and after a whole career chasing this, that act runs on Arc.
