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🐳 Daily Edition: Circle to Become First Public Company with Network Token

🐳 Daily Edition: Circle to Become First Public Company with Network Token

A $222M raise at a $3B valuation for Circle's Arc token hit the headlines today, could they break the bad TGE streak?

Will McKinnon & Beluga
May 11, 2026

While Bitcoin continues to ping pong around the $80k mark, one of the biggest entities in crypto announced a massive $220M raise for their upcoming token. Circle, the proprietor of the USDC stablecoin, looks to become the first publicly traded company to issue a network token for their Arc blockchain. Arc is an “institutional” layer 1 blockchain, and its cap table now includes a veritable who’s who of the global financial system with a16z as the lead.

As you’ve no doubt noticed if you’re holding any altcoins right now, the crypto market has gone through a major disillusionment period with the valuation of tokens over the last few years. It’s no longer enough to just have attention, there have to be legitimate business operations and fundamentals to drive prices up (eg Hyperliquid’s 90%+ revenue share with their token). This concept probably sounds funny to any of our readers used to equity markets, but it really is a new philosophy for crypto.

This is all to say, Arc will need to justify its multi-billion dollar valuation once the token actually goes live, otherwise it will just become the latest in a series of horrendous TGE’s. Getting the big boys like BlackRock, Apollo etc in the presale is certainly meaningful, but they aren’t the marginal buyer of a token at the end of the day.