Arc Mainnet, AI Agents, and Tokenized Markets | Nikhil Chandhok, CTO of Circle

David Hoffman (0:02)

Bankless Nation, I am with Nikhil. He is the Chief Product and Technology Officer over at Circle. And coming out of Circle, we've got a pretty big announcement. Nikhil, today is the day. Tell me about what day this is.

Nikhil Chandhok (0:13)

Today is the day of our launch. We're launching Arc Mainnet. We've been working on it for years. We're very proud of the launch today. So it's the first day of a very long journey for us. So very excited to be here.

David Hoffman (0:26)

Well, congratulations on Mainnet Day. That's always a very special day. Talk to me about what makes Arc unique. What are the special properties? What are the unique properties that Arc is bringing to the table?

Nikhil Chandhok (0:37)

Right.

I think it's useful to step back and talk about Circle a little bit. Circle started off as a stablecoin issuer and built what is now the largest regulated stablecoin. Arc is taking that idea of building regulated financial infrastructure that bridges what is traditional financial institutions and all this new innovation and takes that idea forward and brings it to an L1 layer. So the core features of Arc are things that people may have heard about already. Like this is, we have something called payment finality, which allows for transactions to be truly final once they are settled. Settlement time is half a second, which allows for minimizing risk along with the payment finality and allowing you to do rapid transactions on the network. Gases in stable coins, starting with USDC, so you don't have to hold a native network token. Well, for crypto users, this may feel like a small feature. For companies that are transacting, that are holding treasuries, that are transacting in RWAs, this is a very significant hurdle to cross because they don't know how to account for things like native network tokens. So not only do they have to hold inventory of native network tokens, but they also don't know how to account those native network tokens on their books. So that's a pretty big deal. We have other things that are launching that are really unique for a blockchain that speak to our full stack nature. We have Arc Studio, which allows you to talk to an AI and deploy a custom contract, which is how we think all financial arrangements in the future will happen.

We have Arc Kits, which allow you to build custom apps on top of Arc. So we have not treated this as just a network launch, but we have treated it as a full stack, like, hey, you want to build a financial application today. How do you get started? What are all the primitives you need? All the way down from the network layer, all the way to the top being the application layer. So that's what's unique about us. I mean, we're really excited to get it on.

David Hoffman (2:57)

I do want to zoom in and expand that tech stack and talk about the different components. But if we were to collapse the tech stack and really summate everything, how would you meme, memeify Arc chain? So Bitcoin is hard money. Ethereum's North Star is decentralization, permissionlessness. Solana is NASDAQ on the blockchain.

What's the meme for Arc? What is your guys' North Star? How would you collapse everything you guys are doing into a simple idea?

Nikhil Chandhok (3:29)

I mean, we've called it economic OS. And when we say economic OS, we think about things that when, like, I mean, I grew up when phones came about. And when phones came about, like when Android came about at Google, I was there and there were six plus operating systems in the market at that time. So it wasn't clear you needed another OS in the market. And what Google did uniquely was it said, like, we have a problem that we have to solve for chip makers. There's a problem that we have to solve for handset makers. We have to solve the problem for developers and we have to solve the problem for users. And if we solve all of those problems together, we will have a very successful operating system, when other operating systems in the past had taken a sliver of the market and solved the problems for that sliver of the market. So when we think about Arc and we think about building an economic OS, we're thinking about solving the full stack of problems. I want to solve application level problems, so problems like sign this transaction or sign multiple transactions, do something as simple as sending USDC from one wallet to the other, should not be a thing that users have to deal with, right? Users should not have to think about things like gas. Like, what is gas? It's a very complicated concept. Engineers understand it, crypto users understand it. But if you believe 5 billion users who are on phones today are going to be using this financial infrastructure, then I don't think we can explain gas to them. We need to be able to explain local money to them. So we have 16-ish stable coins launching on Arc today. And we want to make sure that users are able to interact with the blockchain infrastructure using the currencies that they fully understand. They don't have to use Bitcoin or Ethereum or any other chain for that matter. So I think it is like an economic OS, like it's less of a meme. I know it's a little more nerdy than what a meme could be.