The Edge Podcast · Nov 12, 2026 · 47m · 41m saved
With Gagan Mac, VP of Product and Engineering at Circle
USDC crossed $100 trillion in cumulative transaction volume last week, Gagan Mac, VP of Product and Engineering at Circle, told DeFi Dad on The Edge Podcast. Visa and Mastercard built their scale over decades of retail and merchant distribution; Circle got there by making the dollar itself programmable.
"The way you think about Circle is... it is a neutral market infrastructure company that is building the primitives for the modern age finance that is natively on the internet." — Gagan Mac
Gagan spent nearly a decade in product roles at Twilio before joining Circle, watching programmable communications spawn entire industries like two-factor authentication.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 47 minutes of audio, 6 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 numbers that matter.
Key Takeaways
USDC crossed $100 trillion in cumulative transaction volume last week, which Gagan calls "a monumental milestone"
USDC's 2025 on-chain transfers have nearly matched Visa and Mastercard's combined volume
Circle had a waiting list of 40 to 50 networks wanting its stablecoin before it built CCTP to connect them
Circle built ARC, its own Layer 1, after enterprise risk teams kept asking who validates transactions and when they are final
99.6% of AI-agent-to-agent payments already use USDC
USDC transacts more than Tether despite circulating at about a third of Tether's supply
1. From Twilio To Circle
Gagan's path to Circle ran through nearly a decade in product management, including years at Twilio, where he watched programmable communications spawn entire industries.
Gagan says Circle is doing to money what Twilio did to texting
"Circle was doing in some ways what Twilio had done in the past... take the existing dollar system... and use that as a backbone and then make the dollar digital native." — Gagan Mac
