Timeline
- 8.0
CFTC Charges Cash FX Group S.A., and CEO; Three Others With $950 Million Fraud Scheme
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has charged Cash FX Group S.A., its CEO and three other individuals over an alleged $950 million fraudulent investment scheme that solicited funds for purported forex and crypto trading. The CFTC is the U.S. regulator of derivatives markets and brings civil fraud actions under the Commodity Exchange Act against fraudulent conduct in futures, swaps and other derivatives. Cash FX Group has previously been described as presenting itself as a Panama-based forex trading and education platform.
- 7.5
SoFi tie-up shows stablecoins can provide alternative blockchain settlement rail
SoFi has begun settling debit and credit card transactions with Mastercard using its SoFiUSD stablecoin, migrating its entire card program — which it expects to process more than $25 billion in annualized volume — onto blockchain-based settlement rails. A SoFi spokesperson told Cointelegraph the change does not remove intermediaries from the process but provides an alternative blockchain-based settlement rail. The migration puts a large, live card program on blockchain settlement while leaving how consumers pay unchanged, illustrating that stablecoins can replace a narrow part of the payments stack — the traditional banking rails used to settle obligations between participants. Visa has also moved in this direction, saying in April that its stablecoin settlement pilot had reached a $7 billion annualized run rate and expanded to nine blockchains, which it described as a "viable complement to traditional settlement rails." The shift is largely invisible to cardholders, who continue to use their cards as normal, while the bank settles transactions faster onchain, according to the spokesperson. Experts cautioned that the economics are not automatically better: Gravity Team CEO Martins Benkitis said the network and banks remain in place, and Truth Ventures founder Varun Datta said speed on a blockchain does not necessarily mean a cheaper end-to-end payment once conversion, compliance, integration and stablecoin-management costs are counted.
- 7.5
Circle launches 24/7 stablecoin FX engine as it chases a slice of the $10 trillion currency market
Circle launched StableFX on Arc, the blockchain it brought to mainnet, giving screened businesses 24/7 stablecoin foreign-exchange trading. Participants submit a currency pair, amount and settlement window through a request-for-quote process, and approved liquidity providers compete for the order, with both stablecoin legs settling atomically on a payment-versus-payment basis. The company said users can choose near-instant settlement or defer completion to an agreed window, extending institutional FX activity beyond conventional banking hours. Circle Chief Executive Jeremy Allaire described StableFX as a "strong emerging primitive" for atomically settled, real-time onchain foreign exchange. The launch also gives Arc an immediate institutional use case less than a week after Circle brought the blockchain to mainnet on Sept. 16. Circle's developer documentation currently names USDC and euro-denominated EURC, including an example of an exchange between the two tokens, and the company has said it will add additional local stablecoin pairs without publishing a complete list of pairs already live for StableFX trading. Access is restricted to eligible incorporated businesses—payment companies, financial institutions and corporate treasury desks—rather than retail traders, and Circle said StableFX does not automatically convert a local-currency stablecoin into cash in a recipient's bank account; Circle Mint can provide USDC and EURC liquidity and fiat conversion in supported markets, but not for tokens issued by other companies.
- 7.5
Circle's Arc Stablecoin Layer-1 Opens to the Public
Circle's USDC-focused layer-1 blockchain, Arc, opened to the public on September 16, 2026, following a public testnet that launched in October 2025 and processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year. More than 100 institutional and ecosystem partners were on the network on its first day of public operation, and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire called it "the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself." This is the first time a major stablecoin issuer has launched its own base-layer settlement network, moving Circle from token issuer toward controlling the infrastructure where its stablecoin is used. If institutions adopt Arc for payments and settlement, it could shift a portion of stablecoin transaction flow away from general-purpose chains such as Ethereum and Solana and toward purpose-built, compliance-oriented rails. Arc uses USDC as native gas and can also accept other stablecoins via a paymaster system, with a fee model built on Ethereum's EIP-1559 architecture but replacing block-level adjustments with a weighted moving average of network demand, with fees directed to an on-chain Arc Treasury. Consensus runs on Malachite, a Tendermint-based Byzantine Fault Tolerant engine with a permissioned validator set under proof of authority, and Circle says a possible transition to Proof-of-Stake could come in 2027; USDC had roughly $74 billion in circulation in September 2026.
- 8.5
Circle Launches Arc Mainnet With BlackRock, DTCC and Visa as Validators
Circle launched the public mainnet of Arc, a payments-focused Layer 1 blockchain, on Wednesday, with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem partners on day one. Founding validators include BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, Visa, Standard Chartered, SBI Group, Sumitomo, Worldpay and Galaxy, while USDC (roughly $74 billion in circulation) serves as the chain's native gas token. Circle also completed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens this week, saying the mint is not a commitment to publicly launch the token. It is the most direct attempt yet to move institutional settlement — treasury operations, trading and confidential payments — onto a public chain, using a permissioned validator set to satisfy bank compliance requirements. If the model gains traction, it positions USDC-denominated infrastructure as a competing rail to existing payment and clearing networks, and gives stablecoins a larger role in market structure rather than just as trading collateral. Arc is EVM-compatible with deterministic sub-second settlement finality, supports more than 20 fiat stablecoins (including USDC, EURC, JPYC, KRW1 and TRYB), and connects to over 20 blockchains via Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol and Gateway. Tokenized collateral including BlackRock's BUIDL and Circle's USYC is native to the chain, Aave and Morpho anchor lending, and Binance, Kraken, Bybit and OKX provide access routes; Arc also ships with optional post-quantum signatures and agent wallets, spending limits and nanopayments for machine-driven transactions. Circle framed the 10 billion ARC mint as a technical step toward a possible proof-of-authority to proof-of-stake transition in 2027, and the project previously raised $222 million in a token presale at a $3 billion valuation.
- 7.5
Circle's Arc Sets Sept. 16 Launch With 11 Wall Street Founding Validators
Circle plans to launch its Arc Layer-1 blockchain mainnet on Sept. 16, naming 11 outside institutions — including BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard and ICE — as founding validators alongside Circle itself. More than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders are already working on Arc's private mainnet, and the relationships extend beyond validation: BlackRock invested in Circle's private sale of ARC tokens and is expected to deploy its BUIDL money-market fund on Arc. The structure places prospective customers inside the very infrastructure they may later depend on, merging the roles of network operator, investor and end user in a single cohort of Wall Street firms. It marks a substantial step in institutional adoption of stablecoin-native settlement infrastructure, while concentrating consensus power among a small set of vetted institutions whose individual voting weights remain undisclosed. Arc is built around deterministic finality: its Malachite consensus engine uses a permissioned Proof-of-Authority model in which a rotating validator proposes a block and more than two-thirds of the validator set must pre-commit to the same block before it is finalized, after which Arc says transactions cannot be reorganized or reversed at the consensus layer. Launch configuration is expected to use roughly 20 SOC 2-certified validators across multiple regions, though individual voting power has not been published, and Arc's disclosures state that neither Arc Network Services LLC nor its permissioned validators is responsible for the content, legality or functionality of third-party applications.