Circle's Nikhil Chandhok on USDC, Open USD, and What a Stablecoin Issuer Competes On

A dollar stablecoin is not technically hard to build. Several well-run companies have tried over the past three or four years without displacing the two that lead the market. Nikhil Chandhok, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Circle, puts the reason down to one property, and it is the only one a new issuer cannot ship on launch day.

"While new entrants can participate, eventually you have to achieve functionality for your users. And that functionality shows up in the form of liquidity."

Chandhok joined Sri Misra on Unhashed on July 14, 2026, two weeks after a consortium of more than 140 companies announced a competing dollar stablecoin, and a year after the GENIUS Act was signed.

Circle began in 2013 as a Bitcoin payments app. USDC now circulates at roughly $73 billion, works across more than 30 chains, and sits second to Tether's USDT at about $184 billion.

[Watch part one on Unhashed → https://unhashed.co/nikhil-pt1]

What the GENIUS Act changes for stablecoin issuers

The GENIUS Act, signed on July 18, 2025, is the first US federal framework for payment stablecoins. Section 4 prohibits a permitted issuer from paying holders any form of interest or yield, in cash, tokens or other consideration, solely for holding the coin. Reserves must be backed at least 1:1 in high-quality liquid assets, with monthly attestations.

The yield ban is the provision that reshapes product strategy. It stops issuers competing on the rate they pass through and moves the contest onto where a token is accepted and how easily it converts to dollars. One question remains open: the statute is silent on affiliates and exchanges, and the OCC has proposed extending the prohibition to them.

Timing matters for what Chandhok claims later in the conversation. Under Section 20 the law takes effect on the earlier of January 18, 2027 or 120 days after regulators finalise implementing rules. Regulators passed their one-year rulemaking deadline on July 18, 2026 with every major package still in proposal form, which leaves January 18, 2027 as the operative date.

For Chandhok, the significance of the law is not the compliance burden. It is that a regulated dollar token stops being a financial product operating near the system and becomes part of it.

"Even though we have operated in the regulated space for quite some period of time, I think we needed this federal law to essentially enshrine USDC as a way of doing business, and stablecoins in general as actual money inside the financial system."

He expects the effect to travel. US financial rulemaking tends to get copied, and regulators elsewhere are drafting frameworks that sit compliant or synthetic over GENIUS, which widens the market for stablecoins generally rather than for US issuers alone.

What Circle is building beyond USDC

Circle's strategy is to make USDC the centre of a stack rather than the product itself. Circle Payments Network sits above it and lets payment companies route flows without building onchain infrastructure. Arc, Circle's Layer 1, sits below it with USDC as the gas token.

The layer Chandhok spends longest on is the least visible. Moving a dollar onchain is straightforward; landing it in a bank account in another country is not, and that capability takes years, licences and banking relationships to assemble.

"Not just delivering a stablecoin, but delivering settlement functionality. Making it so that you can settle in less than a second, and making it so that if you have a payment flow, we know how to terminate it in 65 geographies around the world."

Taken together, those pieces describe a different kind of company from the one that issued a token in 2018.

"All of that together makes us more like a platform company and less of an asset issuer."

Open USD, and how Circle reads new competition

On June 30, 2026, Open Standard announced Open USD, a dollar stablecoin backed by more than 140 companies including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google and Standard Chartered.

Open Standard is an independent company governed by a board of its partners. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem without fees or volume caps, and most reserve revenue is returned to participating partners after a management fee. The token is expected to go live later in 2026.

Circle and Tether are not part of the consortium.

Chandhok's first move is to resize the question. Counted as M2 dollar money, the addressable market is around $22 trillion; on broader measures of electronic money, closer to $100 trillion. At that scale, an uncontested position was never realistic.

"When you have such large markets, I think it would be really foolish to imagine that nobody's going to compete for market share."

Against those numbers he reads a stablecoin market of roughly $300 billion as early, and argues that growth in the category outweighs the loss of any single account.

"The more money becomes stablecoin money, the easier it is for us to compete because we are more liquid than most money is in the world."

The evidence he offers for the liquidity moat is the track record of everyone who has already tried. Building the token is the easy part, and capable teams have not been able to buy their way past the depth incumbents already hold.

"There is a whole set of companies that have tried over the last like three or four years. And these are named companies that have really good execution records."

On the newest entrant he is factual rather than dismissive, and on the timeline he is correct: OUSD has partners and a design, not a live token.

"Their product is not live. I don't know how it works. Nobody's using it. So when we know what it is, then maybe it changes."

His counter-position comes with a date attached, and it lines up with the GENIUS effective date.

"We will be the first genius compliant stablecoin in the market, the most liquid, genius compliant stablecoin in the market come January."

He also points out that many of the firms on the Open USD announcement are existing USDC users, some of them slated for Arc. Partner on one layer, competitor on another, is the ordinary structure of payments.

Why USDT leads in India, and what would change it

Misra put the India question directly, citing estimates of more than 100 million users in a market where USDT dominates. Chandhok's answer is not about brand or product quality. It is about whether an institution can exchange the token for dollars at source.

"The way we grow internationally is we provide primary market liquidity. You can come to us directly, mint USDC, and redeem USDC for dollars. In a market like India, it's very hard to do that, at least so far. When it changes, we will be there."

Primary market liquidity means going straight to the issuer with dollars and receiving tokens, or the reverse. Without that channel, local demand is met on secondary markets where depth is thinner and pricing is worse. Circle has built it in markets such as Japan. In India it has not, and Chandhok says the team is watching without predicting when that changes.

He is unusually direct about how far ahead the incumbent is, and does not attribute it to anything other than time in market.

"Tether also has a head start on circle. I think like four or five years in terms of product, and it speaks to their network effects."

His case for closing that gap rests on what USDC will be able to do rather than on what it holds today.

"In three years, five years time, as we add more primitives to what you can do with USDC, I think you want to hold the more useful product."

Asked at the close to put a time horizon on the next $75 billion of USDC circulation, he declined outright. It fits the pattern of the conversation: specific about mechanism, about which markets open and why, and about what a compliance date is worth in January, and deliberately unspecific about when any of it reaches a circulation figure.

Part one, covering the GENIUS Act, Circle's platform strategy, Open USD, and the liquidity argument, is on Unhashed with Sri Misra.

[Watch part one on Unhashed → https://unhashed.co/nikhil-pt1]