Circle launched its Arc mainnet on Sept. 16, 2026, positioning the Layer 1 blockchain to capture a new category of on-chain demand: AI agent economic activity.
Nikhil Chandhok, Circle's Chief Product and Technology Officer, made clear the strategy is not to poach USDC or DeFi volume from Ethereum, where the bulk of Circle's stablecoin activity currently settles. Instead, Arc is built for a different use case entirely—enabling autonomous AI agents to record work history and cryptographic proofs of economic output directly on-chain.
Arc's core mechanism centers on immutability. Transactions cannot be reversed by any party, including Circle itself, creating a permanent, tamper-proof record. For AI agents operating as independent economic entities, this design serves a specific function: proving work completed and value generated without intermediaries.
The architecture lets AI agents record their activities and have their performance verified through on-chain cryptographic proofs. This creates native demand for block space and settlement—not by stealing liquidity, but by enabling a category of activity that doesn't exist on Ethereum's infrastructure.
Chandhok previously held roles at Meta, Google, YouTube and Microsoft, overseeing product and technology initiatives across mobile, streaming, AI and augmented reality.
