The Rollup Circle CTO: Why We Built Our Own Payment Chain with Nikhil Chandhok
Sep 13, 2025
Nikhil Chandhok, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Circle, brings his experience from Meta to discuss the future of stablecoins. He dives into why Circle is building ARK, a dedicated payment chain for USDC, to support scalable and efficient financial infrastructure. Nikhil shares insights on the potential of stablecoins to revolutionize global finance and compares their adoption to the early days of the internet. He also explores the competitive landscape of stable chains and the technological innovations driving this new financial era.
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Why Nikhil Joined Circle
- Nikhil joined Circle to work on stablecoins because he saw them as a globally scalable financial primitive.
- He compares stablecoins to a dollar bank account on the internet that can also deliver yield without intermediaries.
10M Wallet Partner Cost Example
- Nikhil recounted onboarding a partner with 10 million wallets that cost Circle over $100 million on a public chain.
- That experience illustrated why public chains sometimes fail to meet enterprise scale and cost constraints.
Three Core Requirements For Payments Chains
- Circle decided to build Arc because large-scale onboarding on public chains became prohibitively expensive and awkward.
- They need sub-second payment finality, gas payable in USDC, and configurable privacy to support massive consumer and B2B flows.