Catena and Arc: Financial Infrastructure for the Agentic Economy

Catena is live on Arc from day one.

Catena is a new kind of financial platform for AI-operated businesses and their agents. It brings together accounts, fiat and stablecoin money movement, agent identity, policies and controls, assurance protection, and a complete evidence trail in one system.

Starting today, Catena customers can convert fiat into USDC, hold it in their Catena accounts, and send it on Arc mainnet. Agents can also make governed payments that settle on Arc under Catena’s multi-rail policy and approval controls, with evidence that can be reviewed and verified afterward.

Stablecoins move value across borders almost instantly at low cost. For agents, that is useful, but it is only part of the story.

Just as importantly, stablecoins make money movement programmable, with rules encoded in the movement itself rather than applied at the edges. This gives AI safety constraints real force and creates evidence that can be independently verified.

Stablecoins do not make agents safe by default. But even if an agent becomes misaligned, it cannot bypass authority that is enforced cryptographically outside the AI.

That is the difference between giving an agent money and giving it governed access to banking across multiple payment rails. Rules are enforced before and during execution, and every action leaves a record that can be verified and audited afterward.

The evidence trail does more than make agent activity auditable. It also creates the foundation for a new kind of protection for agent payments. More on that soon.

Arc makes programmable stablecoins more powerful with a network designed specifically for fast, predictable financial activity. It is an open, EVM-compatible Layer 1 built for financial markets, real-time money movement, and agentic economic activity.

An agent should not need to acquire or manage a separate volatile token just to spend dollars. Arc uses stablecoins as gas, no other token needed.

An agent should not have to guess at network fees. Arc provides predictable, dollar-based fees.

An agent should not have to wait days, hours, or even minutes for a payment to settle. Arc provides deterministic sub-second finality.

Arc is purpose-built for stablecoin payments and financial markets, rather than for every possible on-chain use case. Its design is intended to keep financial activity from competing with unrelated speculative traffic for capacity.

Arc’s architecture is also designed to support privacy for sensitive financial activity alongside the compliance and reporting requirements of financial institutions.

Arc provides financial infrastructure for programmable money. Catena provides the financial platform businesses need to put that money to work through agents while keeping control.

Money for Agents. Control for You.

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