TechFlow News, May 11: a16z Crypto published a post explaining its investment rationale for Arc. It noted that stablecoins have evolved from crypto-native trading tools into the foundational layer of global financial infrastructure, driving blockchain’s evolution from “application-layer finance” to a “system-level economic operating system.” Last year, stablecoin transaction volume reached approximately $9 trillion—comparable in scale to global payment networks such as Visa and PayPal—while the total supply of USD-pegged stablecoins exceeded $270 billion. Cross-border payments, B2B settlements, and foreign exchange transactions are now becoming core use cases for stablecoins, positioning them increasingly as the “global capital flow upgrade layer.”
a16z Crypto stated that existing blockchain infrastructure remains primarily geared toward crypto-native users and individual developers, lacking native support for large institutional requirements. Its participation in ARC token-related ecosystem development stems from the expectation that, as global finance progressively migrates on-chain, only a handful of public blockchains will be capable of serving as the foundational “on-chain economic system base.”
