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

— Circle launched Arc Mainnet, an L1 blockchain positioned as an "economic OS" with fast settlement, stablecoin gas, and privacy features designed for institutional and emerging economic actors.

— Arc's technical differentiators include half-second payment finality, USDC-denominated gas (eliminating need for native tokens), permissionless contract deployment with permissioned validators, post-quantum signatures, and TEE-based private transactions.

— Agents are expected to become independent economic actors on Arc, requiring infrastructure for reputation, nano-payments, credit access, and provenance tracking to transact trustlessly with users and other agents.

— Agentic commerce is emerging beyond trading—agents now execute real-world purchases (flea medicine, plane tickets, clothing) and will manage services and specialized labor on decentralized markets.

— Arc aims to unlock new economic activity (not just migrate Ethereum dapps), including RWA issuance, tokenized stocks with 24/7 trading, cross-border FX via Stable FX, and meme culture apps rather than competing head-to-head with Ethereum on DeFi.

— Circle intends to partner with regional stablecoin issuers globally rather than issuing in all 190+ countries; Arc's Stable FX and RFQ-based liquidity pools will connect fragmented fiat-to-crypto on-ramps.

— Monitor Arc's agent infrastructure rollout (reputation system, credit markets, nano-payments) over the next 12 months; early adoption by agentic traders and service providers will signal whether agents become meaningful economic actors on-chain.

— Tokenized stocks and 24/7 markets on Arc may unlock new investor demand in emerging markets and from AI-driven enterprises; watch for institutional RWA issuers and exchanges migrating settlement to Arc in the coming quarters.

— Arc's Stable FX and multi-currency on-ramp strategy positions it as a gateway to non-US markets once MiCA (January) and other jurisdictional frameworks finalize; early access to local stablecoins via Arc may create liquidity and capital formation opportunities outside traditional finance rails.