Circle executive Nikhil Chandhok has argued that resistance to dollar stablecoins could keep the United States from drawing as much as $1 trillion in overseas demand for dollars. Summary Chan
Circle executive Nikhil Chandhok has argued that resistance to dollar stablecoins could keep the United States from drawing as much as $1 trillion in overseas demand for dollars.
SummaryMoonshots LIVE brought Chandhok together with ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque and host Peter Diamandis for a discussion about the agentic economy. Chandhok questioned why the US would resist a payment system that, in his view, could attract money from people who already want to hold dollars.
“I was so confused. I was like, why don’t you want this, America? You can raise a trillion dollars from the world, because they believe in the dollar,” Chandhok said.
His $1 trillion figure was an argument about potential demand, not an amount the US has lost or a formal estimate of the cost of a specific restriction. Chandhok also did not identify one rule in the supplied remarks as the cause of that potential loss.
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For Chandhok, the appeal begins with access to dollars outside the US. Dollar-backed stablecoins let holders transfer a digital claim tied to the currency without waiting for each payment to pass through a conventional international bank transfer.
The Circle executive tied that point to money already moving through banks. He estimated that roughly $3 trillion is in transit across the international banking system at any moment, where it is idle because, as he put it, “the technology and the settlement protocols are very old.”
Circle has pursued that payment use case through USDC, its dollar stablecoin. In July, the company and Fireblocks connected USDC settlement tools for institutions. Their arrangement gave Fireblocks customers access to Circle’s Gateway and Payments Network, including a route for USDC transfers that end in local-currency payouts through providers in more than 50 countries. The companies said those payments can settle in minutes, compared with the multi-day processes used by some correspondent banking routes.
Fireblocks said stablecoins made up 69% of the digital asset transaction volume on its platform during the second quarter of 2026. Circle’s Gateway lets participating institutions manage a unified USDC balance across supported blockchains, while Fireblocks applies controls such as transaction approvals and sanctions screening to transfers and payouts.
Chandhok’s argument also has a US government debt dimension. Under the GENIUS Act, permitted payment stablecoin issuers must hold reserves at least equal to the tokens they issue. Eligible reserves include dollars, certain deposits, short-term US Treasury securities and other qualifying assets.
Earlier in September, a report on overseas stablecoin discussions said US officials were considering ways to support private-sector dollar stablecoin projects abroad. The report cited a Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee presentation that examined how adoption by overseas users who did not previously hold dollars could increase demand for short-term Treasury debt.
The committee’s analysis described a possible outcome rather than a government commitment to promote any issuer. Using data through September 2025, it estimated that Tether and Circle had increased their Treasury bill holdings by $70 billion since 2022. The distinction matters for Chandhok’s claim: demand for stablecoins could bring money into dollar assets, but his remarks did not establish that every dollar of additional token demand would become a Treasury purchase.
US regulators are still working through the rules that issuers would have to follow. On Sep. 24, the Federal Reserve issued proposed stablecoin reserve rules and a separate proposal covering applications by insured state member banks seeking to issue payment stablecoins. The Fed identified short-term Treasury bills among the assets that could back tokens issued by firms it supervises.
The proposals also set out how the Fed would review bank applications. Under the GENIUS Act, the agency has 120 days to decide once an application is substantially complete, while interested parties have a 60-day comment period after the notices appear in the Federal Register. Treasury has identified Jan. 18, 2027, as the expected effective date for the law’s main issuer restrictions, although the statute allows an earlier start after final implementing rules are issued.
The Moonshots discussion centered on an economy in which software agents carry out tasks and payments. Circle has been building tools for that use case alongside its institutional settlement services.
In August, a report on Circle’s agent payment activity said the company had launched Agent Stack in May to let software agents hold assets and make programmed payments. Circle reported more than 900 paid services using the platform by the second quarter and said USDC accounted for 99.3% of payment volume on the x402 agent protocol. Those figures describe activity on that protocol, not the size of the entire AI payments market.
Bernstein analysts cited agent payments among the possible sources of future USDC demand. In the same August assessment, they said adjusted stablecoin transaction volume, excluding bots and high-frequency activity, had reached about $11 trillion in 2025 and was running at an annualized rate of roughly $17 trillion through July 2026. The brokerage said Circle could grow even if Congress did not pass the CLARITY Act during the September session.
Wood approached the agentic economy from its energy needs. She argued that US nuclear regulation had raised electricity costs and made the power needed for AI data centers more expensive.
“If we had not regulated nuclear power, electricity prices in the United States would be 50% of what they are now. It’s a travesty,” Wood said. She called regulation “a menace.” Her 50% figure was her assessment; the remarks provided no calculation showing what electricity prices would have been under a different regulatory history.
On robotics, Wood said humanoid machines present a harder engineering problem than robot taxis. “Compared to a robot taxi, a humanoid robot is almost 1,000 times more complex,” she said. While Elon Musk has discussed a late-2028 to 2029 timeline, Wood said ARK expects humanoid robots later and described Musk’s schedule as “Elon time.”
Wood also said healthcare investors are cautious about funding AI because errors in care carry different consequences from failures in many other technology products. Mostaque, meanwhile, contrasted public attitudes toward AI, saying roughly 80% of Americans fear it while roughly 80% of people in China view it positively.
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