Circle CPTO Nikhil Chandhok explains why Arc won’t roll back USDC thefts

Circle launched its Arc mainnet on September 16, 2026, and the first hard question arrived almost immediately: what happens if someone steals your USDC on this network? The answer, according to Circle’s Chief Product and Technology Officer Nikhil Chandhok, is nothing. The funds are gone. Chandhok addressed the rollback question directly during an appearance on the Bankless podcast, framing immutability not as an oversight but as the foundational principle that makes public blockchain infrastructure worth trusting in the first place. No rollbacks, by design Arc distributes its consensus responsibilities across more than 20 validators, which means no single party, including Circle itself, holds the authority to reverse a transaction. That structural choice is deliberate. Giving any entity the power to rewrite history would, as Chandhok put it, undermine the trust essential to blockchain technology. This is a meaningful stance for Circle to take publicly, because Circle has a complicated track record here. USDC operates under a freeze mechanism: Circle can blacklist addresses at the request of law enforcement, and it has done so. That capability exists at the token layer, not the chai...