Circle rolled out its Agent Stack on May 11, a set of tools that lets autonomous AI agents hold assets, discover services, and settle payments in USDC without human intervention. The launch pairs the new stack with a $222 million presale of Circle's ARC token, which powers a stablecoin-native Layer-1 called Arc.
Circle rolled out its Agent Stack on May 11, a suite of tools that lets autonomous AI agents hold assets, discover services, and settle payments in USDC without a person clicking confirm. The stack targets a market where software, not people, initiates the transaction.
The stack has four main pieces, each covering a different part of the autonomous-finance workflow. The Circle CLI gives developers, and eventually agents themselves, a way to interact with Circle's infrastructure programmatically. Agent Wallets give each AI agent its own USDC-holding account, and developers can set spending policies, transaction limits, and approval rules before letting an agent operate unsupervised.
An Agent Marketplace then lets agents discover services from other agents — if one AI needs data cleaning and another offers it, USDC settles the transaction. Nanopayments round out the stack: near-instant, gas-free transfers processed through Circle Gateway that can run as low as $0.000001.
Circle also disclosed a presale of its ARC token that raised $222 million at a $3 billion valuation. The token powers Arc, a stablecoin-native Layer-1 blockchain where transaction fees are denominated in USDC rather than a volatile native token, removing the need to hold a separate asset just to pay fees.
CEO Jeremy Allaire has framed AI agents not as tools that assist human customers but as customers themselves. The Agent Stack turns that framing into wallets, spending rules, and marketplace access built for software rather than people.
Source: Crypto Briefing
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