Token presales got a bad name in 2017. Companies sold digital tokens to anyone with a wallet, raised billions, and a chunk of those projects vanished within months. Nine years later, Circle - which trades on the New York Stock Exchange - just pulled off a token presale of its own. BlackRock and Apollo wrote checks. So did the parent of the NYSE.
Circle pulled in $222 million selling Arc tokens before its new blockchain officially launches, with the raise valuing Arc at $3 billion fully diluted.
Andreessen Horowitz led the round with $75 million. The rest of the buyer list reads like a Wall Street roster: BlackRock, Apollo, the parent of the NYSE, SBI Group, Janus Henderson, ARK Invest, General Catalyst, and crypto exchange Bullish.
This is the first time a public company has done a token presale. The closest cousin is the 2017 wave of ICOs - initial coin offerings - which sold digital tokens to early users. Most of those projects flopped.
Why it's different now: the SEC under Trump is friendlier to crypto. The GENIUS Act, a stablecoin law signed last year, gave the industry a real rulebook to follow.
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Circle's main business is USDC, the second-biggest dollar-backed stablecoin in crypto. USDC runs on other networks like Ethereum and Solana, and a big chunk of it gets distributed through Coinbase, which means Circle pays toll on infrastructure it doesn't own.
Arc changes that. It's a public blockchain Circle built for big institutions, designed to handle the contracts and rules banks need to play.
Circle keeps 25% of Arc's 10 billion tokens, with builders and users getting 60% and a long-term reserve getting the last 15%. Owning the rails means owning more of the fees, so validator income and staking rewards now show up on Circle's side of the table.
CEO Jeremy Allaire framed the move bigger than crypto. "We're entering this era where software machines will power the economic system," he said. He pointed to AI agents - software that makes decisions on its own - as the next wave of users for Arc.
Circle stock jumped more than 2% Monday on the news, even as first-quarter results landed mixed. Earnings of 21 cents per share beat by 3 cents, but revenue of $694 million missed the $722 million target.
The bigger question is who else copies this playbook. Banks and fintechs are eyeing their own dollar tokens, which would chip away at Circle's middleman role.
Three things to watch:
Public companies just got a new way to raise cash. The rest of corporate America is watching.
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