the un# podcast · 2026-08-29 · 10 min
The entire ad-funded internet exists because of one missing capability in 2008: no way to move a fraction of a cent. Circle's Chief Product and Technology Officer explains why stablecoin payments for AI agents remove that constraint, and why he would not build Android the same way today.Few people have watched the internet's business model form from as many seats as Nikhil Chandhok, an early Google and YouTube product lead who launched YouTube on the first iPhone, ran AR at Meta, and is now CPTO at Circle, issuer of USDC. His argument here is blunt: mobile app ecosystems went ad supported by constraint, not by choice, because nothing underneath them could clear a microtransaction, and much of what we now call DeFi was simply unbuildable in 2008. He walks through Circle Agent Stack and the Arc blockchain competing internally for the same developers, why Circle will not lock agents onto its own chain, and why settlement finality is the feature that actually matters once agents start trading.
Circle, USDC, and the OUSD Challenge | Nikhil Chandhok, CPTO Circle74 / 100
Jake Brukhman (CoinFund) on Anthropic Fable 5, Agents & Asymmetry in AI 79 / 100
Steven Goldfeder(Arbitrum) on Why the World's Biggest Institutions Are Coming On-Chain76 / 100
Inside the Centralized Database Holding Trillions of Dollars48 / 100
Why AI Agents Aren't Ready to Manage Your Crypto Portfolio Yet64 / 100