Circle’s Chandhok outlines Arc’s growth strategy for AI agents

Circle just launched Arc, a Layer-1 blockchain built from the ground up for stablecoins and AI agents. And in a move that might surprise the usual zero-sum tribalists in crypto, the company’s Chief Product and Technology Officer says the goal isn’t to poach users from Ethereum. Nikhil Chandhok put it plainly during the Arc mainnet launch on September 16: “If all we did was we took activity from Ethereum and moved it to ARC we didn’t really grow the market.” A blockchain designed for machines, not just humans Arc’s core thesis is that the next wave of onchain economic activity won’t come from humans swapping tokens on DEXes. It’ll come from AI agents conducting transactions at machine speed, verifying their own work, and building reputations onchain. To support that vision, Circle built what it calls the Agent Stack, which rolled out in May 2026 after a public testnet went live in October 2025. The stack gives AI agents access to primitives like provenance proofs, reputation systems, and nanopayments. On the technical side, Arc uses USDC as its native gas token rather than minting a separate fee currency. That’s a deliberate design choice: it means every transaction on the network i...