Circle has a new customer segment in mind, and it does not have a pulse.
In an October 12, 2026 appearance on the NYSE/ICE House Podcast, Circle Chief Commercial Officer Kash Razzaghi described AI agents as a fresh category of buyer. He also argued that these agents gravitate toward USDC for a handful of practical reasons.
What Razzaghi laid out
Razzaghi framed USDC’s appeal around three priorities that matter to machines more than to people: programmability, low transaction costs, and availability at any hour.
Circle’s own figures suggest the pitch is landing. As of mid-October 2026, the company reported 165 million transactions involving approximately 80,000 agents.
Circle also reported that USDC accounted for 99-99.8% of transaction value on the x402 protocol, a payments standard used for these agent-driven transactions.
Cost is a big part of the story. Circle says USDC enables near-zero-cost settlement, with transactions as small as $0.000001.
AI agents are becoming new customers that prefer USDC based on three key priorities.
That framing, shared alongside the interview, captures how Circle wants the market to see this shift. Agents are not just tools that move money on someone’s behalf. In Circle’s telling, they are customers in their own right.
The Agent Stack behind the numbers
The figures Razzaghi cited trace back to a product launch earlier in the year. On May 11, 2026, Circle rolled out its Agent Stack, a suite of tools built specifically for autonomous AI agents.
The stack has four main pieces: Agent Wallets, an Agent Marketplace, the Circle CLI, and nanopayments.
The wallets give agents somewhere to hold funds, while the marketplace gives them somewhere to spend them. The CLI lets developers work with Circle’s tools directly from code rather than through a dashboard. Nanopayments handle the ultra-small transactions that make machine-to-machine commerce viable.
Together, the tools are meant to let agents transact programmatically across different chains and protocols. Traditional payment methods typically carry higher costs and onboarding hurdles, which Circle argues makes them a nonstarter for high-frequency machine-to-machine transactions.
What this means for Circle and the agentic economy
Circle is trying to make USDC the default settlement asset for what it calls the agentic economy, and the early data gives it a credible claim to that position.
That said, the numbers deserve some context. Roughly 165 million transactions sounds enormous, but when individual payments can be as small as $0.000001, transaction count and economic value are very different measurements.
There is also the question of concentration. A market where one stablecoin captures 99-99.8% of transaction value on a key protocol means the agent economy’s payment layer leans heavily on a single issuer.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Kaye Quema. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.