Nikhil Chandhok says that for his first couple of years at Circle he was confused. "I've been at Circle for five years, and for the first couple of years, I was so confused," said Chandhok, the company's chief product and technology officer. "I was like, why don't you want this, America? Because you can raise more money."
The "this" was the dollar stablecoin. Chandhok's argument, made on stage at Moonshots Live 2026 alongside ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood, was that stablecoins, and the broader conversion of financial assets into blockchain tokens, are good for the United States. They help it borrow, and they make it easier for the rest of the world to invest in American companies. Wood added a prediction of her own: the dollar will keep rising, which she called a "win, win" for people abroad who use stablecoins. The conversation was recorded on September 25, 2026, and published as an episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis on September 29. The show's host, Peter Diamandis, and Emad Mostaque, founder of Intelligent Internet, also took part.
The question: if you can tokenize a dollar, why not everything?
The exchange opened with a bullish framing of America's position. The point was made that Europe has "no securitization" and "no energy", that dollar stablecoins were circulating faster, and that this could be "the bull case for America." The discussion then turned to Chandhok: bonds are "so cumbersome", so what did he see in the future of securitizing all assets? "If you can securitize a dollar, why can't you securitize anything," the question went, "particularly with the intelligence we have today?"
Two terms carry the discussion. A stablecoin is a digital token designed to hold a steady value, usually one US dollar. Circle issues USDC, which the company describes as redeemable one-for-one for dollars and backed by cash and cash-equivalent reserves. Tokenization means representing an ownership claim, such as a share, bond or fund stake, as a token on a blockchain, a shared digital ledger. Those tokens can then move and settle under the rules of software called smart contracts.
"Exporting the dollar"
Chandhok agreed that tokenization should happen. He said it is more common outside the US, because American securities laws are "a little more complicated" and "need to evolve" to allow more experimentation. He added that the SEC was "putting out new rules as we speak."
But he started with the dollar itself. In his account, USDC "essentially exports the dollar into the world." People abroad do real work, earn their local currency, sell it and buy dollars. "They're essentially lending us their labor. They're lending us their money," he said. For a country that wants to borrow and grow while interest rates are high, he argued, that is strategically valuable. Stablecoins are one way to "collect money from people so that they can invest in your growth, and then you can pay them back." Of the scale, he said "you can raise a trillion dollars from the world" from people who "believe in the dollar."
Circle's description of its reserves shows one concrete link between a token held abroad and US government borrowing. Most USDC reserves sit in the Circle Reserve Fund, a government money-market fund managed by BlackRock that can hold short-dated US Treasuries, overnight Treasury repurchase agreements and cash.
Markets that never close, and money stuck in transit
Chandhok then turned to other assets. He expects Treasuries to be tokenized and said bonds already are being tokenized. Tokenization, he said, does two things, both inside and outside the US.
The first is round-the-clock trading, which he said makes capital more efficient. He said a Treasury cannot be traded after four or five o'clock Eastern "until, like, Monday morning", adding that someone on stage would "know this better than me." Diamandis joked: "No more sleep anymore, ever." The answer that followed was that "your agent will handle it for you": software agents that keep managing capital and its allocation while their owners sleep.
Chandhok illustrated the cost of slow systems with money in transit between countries. At any moment, he said, about $3 trillion is "probably" moving through the international banking system and is not being put back to work in the economy, because "the technology and the settlement protocols are very old." He then sketched the scale against a world economy of $100 trillion, saying as he did so that he was "making numbers up." His point was the rough size of the opportunity rather than a precise measure: "If you had $3 trillion more of float to invest in the world economy, what would that mean?" (Float is money that is in transit and temporarily idle.)
Access in both directions
The second benefit, Chandhok said, is access. His example was his own company. Circle went public "last year", he said, and its stock has since been tokenized by third parties. He called it "one of the most traded tokenized stocks in the world," with that trading happening outside the US. People abroad want to participate in Circle but have "no good way of doing it outside of owning a tokenized version." That, he argued, is good for America: foreigners are choosing to put their money into American companies.
The kind of token matters. In a January 2026 statement, SEC staff distinguished tokens issued by or on behalf of the company itself from tokens created by third parties. Some third-party tokens represent a stock held by an intermediary. Others give only synthetic economic exposure, not ownership in the underlying company. The staff said the legal structure, not the stock name attached to a token, determines what rights an investor has, and that securities laws apply in every format. The statement is a staff interpretation, not a Commission rule.
Chandhok said access also works the other way. Countries that tokenize their securities and modernize their financial systems would attract more capital, he argued, because investors would not depend on "the local regulator just telling you something." Money held in a smart contract would not "disappear", because investors could audit how the system works. Countries without AI infrastructure that want to bring in capital must offer better guarantees and returns, he said: "It cannot be the case that I invest a bunch of money and then the company I invested in gets nationalized."
He called tokenization "just an inevitability" and compared its expected rise with agents taking on more cognitive work. He pictured that work itself being securitized, lent and borrowed against, as "new primitives that are coming." Diamandis asked the room whether they could "feel the speed of the economy accelerating as we talk."
What the SEC has actually done
The SEC action that most plausibly fits Chandhok's "as we speak" came eight days before the recording. On September 17, 2026, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins described an Innovation Exemption for certain tokenized-stock trading arrangements. It gives temporary, conditional relief from the legal definition of an exchange to qualifying tokenized-securities venues, and from the definition of a dealer to certain liquidity providers. Atkins called it a bridge toward more durable rules and said antifraud and market-manipulation rules still apply in full. It is an exemption, not a finished rulebook.
Wood: the dollar is turning
Wood then asked to add to what she called "a really important conversation." There has been a narrative, she said, that "U.S. exceptionalism is dead," with people pointing to the dollar's fall last year. But the dollar had started to rise again, she said, and she compared the moment to the early 1980s, when, in her account, business-friendly policies helped the dollar double. Because of everything discussed on stage, she said, "the dollar is actually going to go up," which would be a "win, win" for stablecoin users elsewhere in the world.
Then she added a piece of ARK news. "I'd be remiss. Certainly my team would feel I'd be remiss," she said, before explaining that ARK had just "securitized" its venture fund, announced "yesterday." Diamandis congratulated her. The announcement she meant came on September 24: ARK and the tokenization firm Securitize said they were tokenizing the ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX). ARKVX is an actively managed interval fund that invests in private and public innovation companies; the release lists OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks among its holdings. The tokenized fund interests would first be available on the Ethereum blockchain to eligible investors, with Securitize providing the issuance and investor infrastructure.