Circle showcases Agent Stack at Agentic AI Summit, betting USDC becomes money for machines

Circle brought its Agent Stack to UC Berkeley’s Agentic AI Summit this week, making its clearest pitch yet that USDC should be the default currency for a world where AI agents buy, sell, and settle transactions without human intervention. The toolkit, which originally launched on May 11, gives developers the infrastructure to build autonomous AI systems with programmable USDC wallets. What the Agent Stack actually does Circle’s Agent Stack includes three core components. Agent Wallets give each AI system its own programmable USDC wallet. An Agent Marketplace connects these systems to services and counterparties. And Circle Gateway handles the settlement layer, including nanopayments as low as $0.000001. An AI agent can autonomously purchase a phone number for 5 USDC, make a voice call, and settle the cost at 0.133 USDC, all without a human touching anything. Circle demonstrated exactly this workflow during the summit. Nikhil Chandhok, Circle’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, spoke at the Berkeley event about building infrastructure for what he called the “Agentic Economy.” The summit drew over 5,000 attendees and included a global livestream. The ARC token and Circle’s bigger...