Welcome to the OpenSea digest. Let’s look back through the biggest NFT and web3 news of the week.

Circle launches Arc blockchain built for banks and AI agents

Circle Internet Group, the company behind the USDC digital dollar, turned on a new blockchain called Arc on September 16, according to a company press release.

The Arc blockchain was designed so that computers can pay transaction fees in USDC instead of a separate cryptocurrency, and to settle payments in under a second.

More than 100 banks, exchanges and other crypto service providers joined Arc on its first day, including BlackRock, Visa, and Opensea. 

Circle says the network also gives artificial intelligence programs a way to buy, sell and move money via agents.

Lumen Prize artists to examine responsibility in digital art

The Victoria and Albert Museum, a London arts museum, will host a free Sept. 19 talk examining how artists use artificial intelligence, memory, ecology and digital systems to consider responsibility and care in technology, according to the museum. 

The event, titled “The Age of Responsibility,” will include Lumen Prize Executive Director Gillian Leitten, multidisciplinary artist and crypto poet Ana María Caballero, media artist Shaheer Tarar and Superflux directors Anab Jain and Jon Arden, with V&A curator Melanie Lenz chairing the discussion. 

The Lumen Prize works discussed during the event will also be screened, including Tarar’s “(MOTH) IN RELAY,” the source of the event’s cover image. The talk is part of the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend, a free digital art and design festival running Sept. 18-20.

Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell bring The Wild Within to New York

Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell present “The Wild Within” at Leila Heller Gallery, a New York art gallery, with the exhibition running through Oct. 22.

The show includes motion works displayed on screens, archival pigment prints and physical wall sculptures. 

The exhibition opened Sept. 10 with a reception at the gallery’s 22 East 80th Street location, and Koopmans said he and Wexell will be in New York for the duration of the show.

Auriea Harvey brings digital art and sculpture to Heft Gallery

Auriea Harvey, a digital artist, has opened “Ready To Die,” a solo exhibition at Heft, a New York gallery, with 48 works spanning marble, ceramic, bronze, wax, wood and generative video. 

The exhibition connects Harvey’s decades of digital art practice with physical sculpture, including works made with 3D scans, digital modeling and machine carving, according to Heft. 

Harvey also presents a series of Amulets, each pairing a hand-finished sculpture with a digital counterpart recorded on Ethereum, a blockchain network, using Gaussian splatting, a method for creating three-dimensional digital images from many visual samples. 

“Ready To Die” is on view at Heft through Oct. 9, with an installation ceremony for the marble works scheduled for Oct. 1.

SEC approves temporary framework for trading tokenized stocks

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved a temporary exemption Sept. 17 allowing limited trading of tokenized NMS stocks on certain blockchain-based venues.

The framework covers Tokenized Securities Venues, permissioned platforms that use automated market makers and liquidity pools to bring together buyers and sellers of tokenized National Market System stock. Conditions include limits on the number of symbols and volume; a requirement that a tokenized stock provide holders the same rights and privileges as the underlying shares; written notice and an opportunity for the issuer to object before a third-party tokenized stock is made available for trading; smart contracts that must be auditable, public, and deployed on a public, permissionless distributed ledger; a requirement to halt trading concurrently with any halt in the underlying stock on the primary listing exchange; and public notice about the venue's operations and trading activities.

The SEC said the exemption is temporary and intended to let these venues operate while it weighs longer-term rulemaking, and it is requesting public comment on the framework.

Refik Anadol named to TIME100 Art 2026

Digital artist Refik Anadol was named to TIME100 Art 2026 and recognized by TIME magazine as the “Artist of the AI age.”

The honor follows the June opening of Dataland, Anadol’s Los Angeles museum focused on AI-generated art, where works respond to visitors’ movements and biometric data collected from electronic bracelets.

Anadol is also known for a large-scale data sculpture at the MoMa New York that uses machine learning to transform data from the museum’s collection into moving images.

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