SPEAKER_00: We have a vision for what an internet financial system can look like. We have a vision for what open, programmable, composable money can bring to the world and the innovation of that and the open internet and what that makes possible. And we want to make sure that that can come to life and not be stifled. And that does require policymakers and governments to actually create more degrees of freedom

SPEAKER_01: for innovation to happen, as has happened in other major areas of the internet.

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SPEAKER_08: Welcome back to This Week in Startups. My name is Alex. I'm Alex over on X or Twitter, if you want to call it that. Today, we have a very special guest, one that I've been looking forward to talking to for some time. Now, I've been covering crypto since 2013, 2014, somewhere in there. Back when Bitcoin was either double or triple digits, if you want to know how far back that was. And a question that has always come up is, what will be the killer use case for crypto? Some people said store of value. Some people really leaned into trading. I think that at the union of those two things is the real thing that crypto is going to unlock for the world, and that is stable coins. So, today on the podcast, we have Jeremy Allaire back. Jeremy is the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Circle.

SPEAKER_09: Jeremy, hey, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Alex. It's awesome to be here. Excited for the conversation.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So, before the show, we were talking about the ancient past, the 90s, if you will, and the era of the internet that brought us into the 2000s. You founded a company called Allaire that made ColdFusion. Tell us about how you took that company and ended up the CTO of Macromedia.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely. So, just, yeah, going way back in time, just even before I founded that company,

SPEAKER_00: I got involved in the internet in 1990. And the thing that got me interested in this was I experienced firsthand the sort of power of open networks, distributed and decentralized networks, open protocols, open source software. This is sort of what I like to refer to as, like, the DNA of the internet. And I experienced that as I was looking at, you know, what was happening with the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was sort of studying that. And I basically, you know, I went very deep on technology and became convinced that, like, this would be transformative to the world. And then in 1994, as the very first, like, graphical web browser technology emerged, it became really clear, like, okay, we now have, like, a piece of software that you could render content and applications and other things into, which led to this concept of sort of the web as an application platform. And so, with my brother and others, we co-founded a lair, which built, as you noted, ColdFusion. And ColdFusion came out in January of 1995. And it was the first commercial web programming language. There were some things like Perl, if you remember Perl. And, like, yeah, and people would write C code behind web servers to, like, make things dynamic in web browsers. But ColdFusion really made it easy and accessible to anyone who had an idea and, like, $1,000 to build an interactive application you can deliver through a browser. And that was a really big concept in 1995. And that, like, took off. And we rode the whole wave of people building websites, e-commerce, bringing content online. We had literally, with the whole family of tools that we built out, we had millions of developers using our software. And then, as that market matured, like, we took the company public in early 1999. And we were unfashionable because we were profitable. Most companies going public in the dot-com era were not profitable at all. But it was good. But we were kind of an armed supplier to the whole Internet 1.0 revolution. And then, after we went public, we merged with Macromedia, which was also a huge provider of tools for building the internet. Building the web, building content, and so on. And I, yeah, I became the chief technology officer of that combined company. And then helped pioneer the use of Flash, which we all probably remember as, like, a very powerful piece of software for doing deeper forms of media communications interactivity over the Internet. And that was, yeah, that was back in 2001.

SPEAKER_15: So, so going back quite some time.

SPEAKER_16: I mean, we outgrew Flash, but I do think Flash gets a bad rap in retrospect.

SPEAKER_08: Like, we used it for a really long time. Flash was great until we, I don't know, had better stuff. But I feel like there's a lot of, like, Monday morning quarterbacking about the demise of Flash that I don't think is entirely fair. I know a lot about it.

SPEAKER_19: I know a lot about it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: So, this is a little bit of a layup for you, but, you know, given your conversation about the Internet, open protocols, decentralization, what brought you from the end of your time in Macromedia to 2013 when you decided that, hey, we need to found Circle. We need to start working on the stablecoin issue.

SPEAKER_23: So, I presume that there's some ideological kind of, like, parallels between those two points.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So, I mean, if you go back to sort of what brought me into the Internet in the first place, I was actually studying international political economy.

SPEAKER_00: I was sort of looking at kind of comparative economic systems, political systems. I was very interested in sort of international economic systems, stuff like that. I got, you know, excited about the Internet, got excited about sort of the transformation of these open networks and what that can do for information and information distribution and software distribution. And that was sort of led there. And then, actually, it was at Macromedia where, you know, we back in, you know, it was 22 years ago, we put a seamless way to play video into Flash Player in March of 2022 or 2002, sorry. And we basically made, like, video playback ubiquitous on the Internet. And we kind of made it for the first time. It was, like, easy for anyone to, like, put video into a browser. And that really, that led to the development of YouTube, which exploded. That was all built on Flash Player video. And that also led me to found a company, Brightcove, which basically was taking, again, these fundamental DNA of the Internet, open networks, open protocols, distributed systems. And my idea was, well, we could basically enable any company, any media company to directly distribute video and television on the Internet. And, you know, back in 2004, right, we had just started getting broadband. We had just started getting Wi-Fi. We didn't really have mobile devices yet, but there were all this talk about connected devices. And it was very clear, like, okay, I can see how, like, we're going to have all these connected devices. We're going to have Wi-Fi and mobile broadband, and that's going to unleash video in a way that wasn't possible. So, built up a kind of online television distribution system, online video platform. And that, you know, that was kind of a continuation of sort of, okay, there's now new stuff you can do on the Internet. It's richer. It's fuller. It's sort of more true to things people thought during the dot-com era would be possible, actually became possible in Web 2 when you had these sort of more technology proliferation that was better. And that was a very successful business and grew, and we IPO'd Brightcove in early 2012. So, we sort of grew it to that point. And so, here's sort of getting to the answer to the question, which is when the financial crisis hit in 2008 and 2009, that, like, significantly stimulated my earlier interests that were my earlier kind of academic interests. And I sort of became like an armchair political economist. And so, I found myself reading a huge amount about the nature of money, central banking, the international monetary system, the nature of fractional reserve banking, like, all this stuff. I became really interested because I was like, how did this happen? And is there a better way forward? Is there a better way to build the international monetary system? And, you know, it's not the kind of thing where, you know, you sort of wake up one day and say, I'm going to create a startup to, you know, transform the international monetary and economic system. It's not, you know, it's not a typical thing that you just decide to do. But, so, at that time, 2009, you know, 2010, like, I didn't do that because there wasn't a clear path to do that. It was more just, I'm interested in this. And then in 2012, actually, not long after I took Brightcove public, I came across crypto and went down the rabbit hole and got very excited about the technology. And I am a technologist, I'm a product guy, and I kind of looked at it from a technology first perspective. And, you know, I saw several things. I was like, wow, this is actually a technical breakthrough. There are problems, there are computer science problems that have been solved here that are really powerful.

SPEAKER_01: And, like, the first time I synchronized the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain onto my laptop and was able to conduct a transaction using that directly over the internet, that was like the NCSA mosaic moment for me.

SPEAKER_00: It was like, oh, my God, this direct infrastructure where you can safely and provably conduct a transaction directly with a counterparty over an open source protocol on the internet. It's like, wow, this is a breakthrough. This is a missing, it's a fundamental missing piece of the internet. And the more that my co-founder and I dug in, the more that, and in particular into, like, the technical community, there are a lot of people in the technical community of crypto back then who were really jazzed about ideas like, how could you use this tech to not just have Bitcoin, but issue other types of, now we call them digital assets or digital tokens on these networks. And, you know, I had built virtual machines and helped build programming languages and stuff in the past, as we just talked about. And so, there was discussion of how could you make these types of digital assets programmable? How could you have programmable money? How could you have smart contracts? And these were, like, ideas on napkins for a lot of people. There were a couple of white papers and stuff. But it was very clear that all those things would happen. And we could see very clearly how all those things would happen. We didn't know the exact timeframe, but we knew that those would happen. And when we looked at all that, and I kind of merged that with my thinking about, like, how do you build a safer financial system? And how do you build a more open financial system? All this, like, converged. And I became, basically, it's all I could think about, totally obsessed, and obviously decided to found Circle. And, you know, the basic idea, and it goes back to something we were talking about before we started the show. The basic idea was, can we create, like, an HTTP for money? Can we create a protocol for dollars on the internet that is open, programmable, etc.? That was the idea, you know, 10, 11 years ago. And now we've done it. Like, it's here, and it's happening. And as you introduced, right, it's sort of killer app of crypto, and it's really starting to take off.

SPEAKER_26: But it took a long time to build it, but now it's quite a significant scale, but yet still very early.

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SPEAKER_08: So thinking about the moment that we saw Bitcoin, um, reach the more broader technological consciousness and then stable coins today, I see a bit of a gap between them. And I know this is perhaps me being an old fuddy duddy, but when I think about Bitcoin programmable money and reforming the world's financial and economic systems, it seems a little bit strange that we've ended up at a place where the coolest and most hot thing on the blockchain is digital dollars. And we'll get to it in a minute, digital euros, is there a tension between the desire for decentralization and more transparency and then stable coins having, you know, themselves tied to existing fiat currencies?

SPEAKER_00: I think, um, you know, my view, and this has been the, the sort of circle path since we started was this concept of a kind of hybrid, uh, system where if we want to move to a, to a world where a huge percentage of the money that's stored, like the stored value and where, you know, economic transactions and economic coordination, um, it, all kinds of economic coordination, not just payments, but like more complex forms of contractual coordination, where, where more and more of these things are happening on the internet natively on chain, as people like to say, if we want to get to that world, um, we have to start from the world we have, right. And, and we have, you know, the dollar is the strongest currency in the world, the dollar, uh, and you can, you can, you can say, Hey, the, there's 34 trillion of debt. And, you know, the U S government could maybe like fall over paying its debts or it's overextended, or it's, you know, take the Ray Dalio argument about these sort of these, these long running cycles. And, and are we in a decline cycle and that's legitimate discourse. Like I, I firmly believe that's very legitimate discourse, but like for, from a here and now perspective, most people in the world want a network that effectively gives them a, a stable unit of account. And gives them a powerful, technologically and utility wise, powerful medium of exchange. And, um, and I think, you know, dollars themselves and digital dollars specifically are, are really, really a powerful and preferred medium. And so that's a starting point and we need it rooted in like real dollars. That's why the way we've designed USDC is sort of, you know, getting as close as we possibly can to like government obligation money. Um, and, you know, kind of this fully reserved. So people who hold are like, wow, okay, this isn't as risky as a bank deposit. This is like, you know, T bills and like, and, and basically, you know, cash that's held with the safest custodians in the world. And like that, that's, you know, for the people who really drill in, they can see, wow, this is, this is ultra safe dollar money. And it has all this utility on the internet and, and that is highly useful. Um, and, and it is a hybrid world because we are, you know, you know, circle is a centralized regulated entity. Um, you know, but, um, the, the protocols of public blockchains are open network protocols, the USDC protocol and, and the CCTP protocol, these protocols, these are open public permissionless protocols that developers can build on that end users can connect to. And there's these vast ecosystems of startups and enterprises and big companies that are connecting to these protocols in the same way that people connected to the HTTP. And, and so you have this kind of hybrid model, um, you get the, you get the benefits of, of this, the public internet infrastructure, and you get the sort of, um, reliability, certainty, um, compliance, legality of a, of a digital dollar that's sort of anchored in, in, in its core. In the existing dollar system. And then providing that interoperability layer so that, you know, you, you want that interoperability layer. A lot of people, you probably remember this when like Skype came out, like, it was like, wow, I can't believe it. I can have free phone calls on the internet. Amazing. Obviously we use all kinds of stuff for that now, but like, you know, for a while it was like really important that like you had interoperability, you could use like Skype out. If you remember Skype out was like, oh, I can use my Skype to like get on a regular connect to the legacy phone system. Right. Um, now, uh, it's not quite the same analogy, but it's similar here in that, like you want interoperability, you want basically the ability to like come on and off chain very, very seamlessly and easily all around the world.

SPEAKER_38: Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: I had in my notes is circle, a trap five company or a crypto company. I tried to answer that question while prepping for our chat today, and I ended up having no answer to it as I'm glad you think that it's hybrid because that makes me feel better about not being able to put the company into one camp in particular. Yeah. I do want to go back just a little bit to the, the point about, um, reserves and so forth. I'd looked into the funds that you guys hold. Yeah. Um, through your, uh, main, uh, black rot. Um, yeah. Fund if you will. Reserve fund.

SPEAKER_44: Yep.

SPEAKER_08: Exactly. Uh, by the way, I do love that in the sec filings, it's like, who can purchase this? Not you just cervical kind of cool to have your own fun. Um, but if you go through the reserves, apart from just standard bank balances, you guys do hold an enormous amount of us federal debt. Yeah. And when we think about the Euro stable coin, uh, EURC, uh, which is in some pretty impressive growth lately. Does that mean that circle is going to hold the underlying backing assets for the Euro stable coin in, um, EU and Euro denominated debts as well?

SPEAKER_34: Yeah. So, um, the European, uh, stable coin laws, um, actually affect both USDC and EURC.

SPEAKER_00: And so July 1st, we announced that we were the first global stable coin issuer to have both a dollar stable coin USDC and a Euro stable coin EURC legal electronic money in the European union and issued and made available in the European union itself. So it's both dollars and Euros that are under that regime. We're the only major company and global player with a dollar stable coin that is actually legally compliant now there. But specifically to your question, um, the, the, the laws kind of, um, prescribe, you know, the kind of safety, uh, of the reserves and, and what you need to do. And Euro needs to be held in Euro cash, or it can be held in, um, basically like the highest rated European government bond. So think of it as German T bills or French T bills, right? Bundes bonds, uh, for example, uh, Jeremy, that's Italy erasure. Come on. I'm just telling you what are the highest rated, you know, government bonds. And so some portion, um, meaningful portion of the reserves can be held that way. Now EURC is new, it's growing, uh, but it's, you know, we're, we're not at the stage where we have that sort of same exact structure as USDC, but we're optimistic about the, the potential for, for Euro stable coin. And, and, um, and, and of course we'll evolve to ensure, obviously it has to be legally compliant.

SPEAKER_54: Um, but, um, but we do have the ability to kind of, um, you know, have a, a similar structure to USDC.

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SPEAKER_08: All right. Let's talk about the state of stable coins as a market. You and I are both a token terminal fans on Twitter, and they had a really excellent set of charts that shows four critical data points here. One is, uh, upper left is outstanding supply, uh, total stable coins in circulation, nearly back to an all time high if I'm reading that chart correctly. But the charts that really stood out to me was the number of stable coin holders, the amount of transfers and how quickly things are moving around. It seems that all the charts right now for stable coins are up and to the right, uh, almost at an accelerating pace. So Jeremy, why is this moment proving so, um, for the stable coin market?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting because, you know, over the years, and I would say, even say two years ago, a year ago, you know, people are always asking like, um, you know, you know, what does it take for this to achieve like mainstream scale? Right. And, and, you know, my answer has, has typically been, um, there's sort of three key things that we need to solve. Right. And, and by we, I don't just mean circle. I'm sort of like collectively, like all of us together trying to figure out how to solve this. One of those is infrastructure. So the infrastructure, the blockchain networks themselves, and, and, and my mental model for

SPEAKER_01: these blockchain networks is these are internet operating systems. And basically we need higher performance, higher throughput internet operating systems, these blockchain networks. And so that's been a big jump over the past couple of years. We've firmly moved into the sort of third generation of blockchain networks through high performance, layer one blockchains and these layer twos. And what that effectively means is that you can do, you can do higher throughput, uh, and,

SPEAKER_00: and the transaction costs for per transaction are either sub ascent or a penny or whatever. And so, you know, this is, you know, Brian, uh, Armstrong tweets about, you know, sub second, sub penny transactions, like we're there. Right. And, you know, there are these high performance networks and that is contributing to that growth because, you know, you bring the unit costs down, the marginal costs down, you make the throughput higher. It's sort of like going from dial up to broadband and web 1.0 to web 2.0. We're kind of going through that infrastructure upgrade and that's unleashing more utility. Now, the second thing is that, um, stable coin networks like USDC are network effect businesses. They are, they are platforms that people build on meaning developers build apps to integrate to the protocol and the more apps that are integrated, the more utility the network has, the more people who have the digital asset, uh, the, the more utility the network has. And so you, you, you have these kind of positive network effect models. And, and then the more that happens, the more the developers say, Hey, like I'm at a competitive disadvantage if I'm building a product, if I don't support USDC. And so you have the infrastructure upgrades, you have these really interesting, both user and developer network effects that are starting to really take hold. And then, you know, you also have like what I'll call like real usability improvements. Um, and it's part of the infrastructure upgrade. You know, you probably remember, you know, just, just even two, three years ago. Right. You know, to use a stable coin, you need to like go buy it somewhere. And then you needed to like, go get like a browser plugin and the browser plugin. You needed to, in order to use it, you needed to buy like Ethereum and like that cost a bunch. And there's like fees and then like, takes you like seven minutes to transfer the Ethereum to your self custody wallet. And like, it's just like completely nonsense, completely nonsense. And, and so it would be like totally justified for someone to say like, who in the right mind is gonna, is gonna use this. But now, you know, you, you literally through, through web based interfaces and mobile app interfaces, you can't onboard into a, a wallet, uh, with like the onboarding experience of like onboarding to like WhatsApp with a mobile ID, a pass key, a face ID, like these kinds of things. It's, it's secure and you don't have to remember seed phrases and all this jazz. And you can, you know, the, the, what I like to call the on and off ramps, which is sort of the, the way in which you can, um, kind of get from the, you know, existing, you know, money system into the on-chain system is much, much easier and getting better. And so all of that combined is creating conditions that allow it to be easier to adopt and use stable coins. And, and sort of the, the, the final boss in all of this, um, is the government. And, and, and so what we're really, I think what's really exciting is that all around the world, almost every major jurisdiction from Japan to Hong Kong, to Singapore, to all of Europe, the UK, UAE and the United States, all these jurisdictions are putting in place laws and regulations that define stable coins as legal electronic money and a part of the real world financial system. And so as those laws happen, then that really opens up the, the, the universe beyond the crypto early adopters to everyone. And so like, I think by the end of 2025, we, we believe that like stable coins will be a legal integrated part of the financial system, like pretty much really broadly. And so that's, I, that's why I also think those, those charts are great and they're fun to look at. And I, and, and we're excited about that. But, um, we also recognize like, it's still super early days when you think about how, how large this phenomenon can be. Um, because we're, we're still, we're kind of like in the crossing the chasm metaphor, Jeffrey Moore's kind of thing. We're, I think we're kind of like midair trying to leap over the chasm right now. We're not, we have not crossed. We have not crossed the chasm. Things could still go bad and we could plummet. Um, but, um, but I think, I think we're gonna make the lead.

SPEAKER_72: Okay.

SPEAKER_08: I want to get to the future currencies point in a second, but on the wallets point, I do think that the user interface for crypto writ large has gotten so much better over the last 10, 15 years, but also in the last couple of years to your point, is there a time in the future that you can see when I have, okay, let's just say a Citibank account and I have a debit card and I want to go purchase something and it's a USDC transaction and Citibank could effectively mediate between my checking account balance of dollars and digital dollars that it might have for its own kind of swapping purposes. And I can use a trad card in a, uh, USDC transaction without needing to have a stable coin account or MetaMask account or Coinbase account, whatever. And I can just use what I have and not even know that I've switched from regular dollars

SPEAKER_09: to digital dollars. So there's a, it's a, there's a lot in that question.

SPEAKER_00: Right. I think, um, so I think there's a lot of things happening simultaneously, um, that are, that are, that align with what you're describing. So on the one hand, we are seeing more and more, um, what I'll broadly call like the fintech forward banks or like the, what are often called Neo banks, right? More and more of these firms that are just adding directly the ability to use stable coins. Um, and so whether that's new bank in Latin America or that's Revolut in Europe or, you know, a, a kind of brokerage, uh, app, like, uh, uh, Robin hood, obviously, you know, in some ways, you know, some of these huge, um, crypto firms like, uh, Coinbase and Binance that have like 400 million users combined. Those are like kind of financial super apps increasingly where you can hold a balance. You can take your paycheck. You can have a card attached to it. You can do these things and, and they make it seamless to get USDC and stuff like that. Um, so we're seeing, you know, more and more of this ability to store value in what you would think of as dollars. Um, it is USDC. And actually, um, you know, we, we work with both Visa and MasterCard today and they have programs in place where a card issuer. So some, someone's issuing like a Visa card or a MasterCard. Those card issuers can issue a card where the money that is being spent is actually stable coin. Um, and so you're spending USDC and there's a big proliferation of these, especially in emerging markets. We're seeing all these products launch with, they're basically like the Neo banking style digital wallet apps that have a card and it lets you use stable coin as your, as your way to store value because people want to hold dollars. And then you spend it in the existing card network rails and it settles using USDC. So like those, those card issuers can actually settle the funds that they owe to Visa or MasterCard actually using USDC itself. So like it's actually being used as a settlement rail for between the, the financial institution and, and, and the card networks. Um, so that's an interesting thing that's happening on that side. Um, on the other side, we're seeing like merchant acquirers. So, you know, the world pays of the world, uh, you know, the checkout.coms of the world, the new vase of the world, the stripes of the world offering options for settlement on the on the, on the, on the merchant side in USDC. So we're, we're seeing. Yeah. So actually one of the coolest, uh, things that we saw, um, earlier this year was John Collison at their big annual conference got up and did his kind of one more thing, uh, uh, thing. And he basically said, Hey, look, um, you know, crypto is back, but it's, it's USDC and it's stable coins. And he demoed basically like in, in the Stripe checkout product, um, which they're rolling out. It's like a, it's like the product that you could just add as a merchant to your website or your app or whatever in the Stripe checkout product. Like USDC payment acceptance will be right there alongside card payment acceptance. And he was really excited about it. Um, and talked about it. There's a video of him on Twitter. You can see, and he basically, you know, shows like, Hey, you can now settle. Look how easy this is. You can have instant settlement on Solana. They demoed with USDC. The money arrives to the merchant instantly, and the fees are much lower. And, you know, he, he sort of made a comment, like, this is how like payments should work. And so we're starting to see these sort of connection points again, the hybrid model, these connection points that, that are there. And I do think that to your, precisely to your question as the kind of legal status of this becomes more clear that more and more, um, financial institutions will sort of say, Hey, yeah, I'm going to use this as like a settlement layer. Um, because it's, um, it's, it's, it's a very powerful way to do that. And, and it could be like a business says, I'll take USDC. Cause I get the money instantly. And it's lower fees. Like good for me, the business. And then on the other side, there's more and more of these end user products, whether it's a traditional bank, a Neo bank, a crypto, a super app, like these different types of apps, where it's a seamless experience to scan a QR code. And as I tweeted about earlier this year, like iOS opening up, uh, NFC, uh, to third party wallets is a really big deal. And that will enable. Yeah. Um, web three wallets that have USDC in theory, it'll enable them to do tap. Hey, right. So you can actually use your phone with a wallet with USDC to make a transaction to a, to a merchant at a point of sale. Other people have to do stuff. The processors, the acquirers have to like enable blockchain transactions. You know, the wallet developers themselves need to upgrade their wallets to add NFC tech, and they need to get approved by apple. And like, there's a number of things that need to happen, but these are all things that are kind of in the 2025 horizon, which is pretty cool. Okay.

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SPEAKER_81: A question that keeps coming up in my mind as I listened to you is who are you making mad?

SPEAKER_08: Because you you're disrupting something. You're not disrupting the dollar. You're actually, I think, strengthening the dollar by helping it become digital. Absolutely. Buying us government debt, similar thing in, in, in Europe. But you know, if I was the leader of a country that had a less stable currency and my citizens were trying to, um, offload their local assets for, for dollars, which they now can do with us. You see, do you run into people telling you to get lost from their national borders? Well, within the international financial system, right?

SPEAKER_00: You have, um, you have a lot of different currencies, obviously there's hundreds literally. Um, and, and you have a lot of different, um, kind of approaches to in the traditional system, how money is allowed to move. Um, and you, um, you know, you, in some big markets, you have very strict laws and capital controls like China and India, right? Those are the two, probably the two biggest examples. And, you know, you don't see us going to China, trying to drive USDC. We can't do that. It's not, that would be funny, but it wouldn't work. Yeah. No. Um, and so in many parts of the world, you have what are called, you know, free floating currencies. And you have kind of open, open currency exchange, and there's no restrictions on, you know, a person, uh, holding different types of currencies. And so huge parts of the world, that is the case. Um, but I, I think, um, it'll be very interesting. I do think that this is an area where it's a, it's certainly going to be complex from a policy and political perspective. Um, and you know, I, I think I like to refer to, you know, stable coins as over the top money. Like we had over the top money. Yeah. Yeah. OTT money. It's like OTT media, OTT communications, OTT software distribution, like all this stuff, like the internet kind of let you do this. And so stable coins are like OTT money, you know, Netflix is OTT television, but like, you know, different countries have different laws about what Netflix can and can't do. Um, and so we will have to navigate that. And we are. And so in what's, what's actually happening is more and more countries are, are, are actually putting stable coin laws on the books and they're figuring out like, okay, well, here's how a foreign issued stable coin, like USDC is going to be allowed to work in our country. And, you know, the intermediaries within those countries that are allowed to be distributors or providers, and what are the reporting requirements and other things. So there are going to be laws that, um, react to this, but at the same time, right, there's utility, there's like the raw utility that exists and end user preference. And I've, I've said this in the past, like, I think increasingly over the next decade, people everywhere will be able to vote with their smartphones, what economic system they want to participate in. And, and that is going to create complex issues, but I do think that that is, that is, um, a path, uh, that, that will emerge.

SPEAKER_88: It's going to be ultimately very, very good for open systems.

SPEAKER_89: I think that. I think so.

SPEAKER_90: That'll go well. I mean, that's sort of my, my thesis from 30 years ago, open internet wins, right?

SPEAKER_08: I mean, I mean, look, if you, as you said earlier, we're looking at the Soviet style economy, what was one of the problems? Well, it was information. You can't essentially plan list. You have all the information. They couldn't get that by definition. Ergo, everything was out of whack at all times. So I think you and I share a transparency leads to efficiency argument. Yes. I just, I wonder what will happen when, I don't know, bricks countries, for example, you know, opt out of this because they want to have stricter capital controls and so forth. I mean, they're going to end up isolated, not only from digital money writ large, but also I just think from an economic system that is experimenting in a way that really helps people escape. What you might call bad economic geography derived luck.

SPEAKER_16: Like I was born in the U S I had dollars my whole life. Right.

SPEAKER_01: Right. It poses significant questions for governments over time.

SPEAKER_00: And my, my, my own belief is that, um, like it just seems inevitable over the coming decades that there'll be like, because of the internet, because of digital currency, because of the proliferation of this technology, it's likely that there will be fewer, you know, fewer major, um, international currencies.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, there already are very few international, major international currencies.

SPEAKER_00: You look at that in the trade flow data and sort of what happens in, in trade flow. Right. But I think even all the way down to the, to the kind of, kind of domestic use, right. I think that there will end up being fewer. Um, and, and that, that ultimately can be very, very positive for economic development. It can be very, very positive for financial stability. It can be, it can be, it can, it can be very, very positive. Um, but it will require some difficult choices for, you know, for countries around the world. And even in the U S government itself, like the treasury department or the U S government, they don't necessarily want to have like the, their economic policy decisions, which they're mandated to make for the domestic U S population. Now, all of a sudden they're like, Oh, now we need to think about the Argentinians or now we need to think about the, this, that is already the case. Like interest rates follow the fed and, you know, we're effectively exporting our inflation or exporting our, our cost of money. And it, it, it already happens that way that what's called the Triffin dilemma in, in monetary, uh, uh, theory that exists for, for, for, for a, a reserve currency. But I do think that these issues, um, will drive towards more consolidation in currencies over time.

SPEAKER_95: We are going to get to interest rates in, um, just a couple of seconds.

SPEAKER_08: So I want to talk about circles, business model, and then also it's, um, history through SPACs, IPO filing and so forth. But sticking just to the currencies and blockchains point, uh, I think there are 15 supported blockchains for USDC today. You guys have. I think there's 16 now. Ah, your website led me astray. This is what happens when, uh, things are moving quickly, uh, 16 blockchains. I apologize. Jeremy. Uh, that's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_98: The dollar stable coin, the Euro stable coin.

SPEAKER_08: Um, you know, I, I guess maybe the right question is, is there a, is there a time the next couple of years when it's 10 currencies and 50 blockchains, or is it going to be more like four currencies and 20 blockchains? How much more did those numbers go up in the near show? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: So a couple of things, I think first I'll talk about blockchains themselves. So while to some people, they might say, Hey, you know, EVMs have one and it's layer one, layer twos, super chains, all this stuff like that. That's like done. I don't agree with that. Um, I, what I see, and I, I, I use my mental model on this is mobile, which is, and you can remember this. And you can remember this. Well, pre iPhone, there were like 17 different mobile operating systems. There was the Symbian operating system, Windows phone, remember, uh, Palm pilot, Blackberry, NTT Docomo, you know, you had tons of different, tons of these different. And, and, and everyone was trying to get developers to say, build on this and get their handsets distributed and all this stuff. It was all awful. Like none of it was any good. It was, it was, it was trash. Yeah. Like, and, and people were like, you go to mobile world Congress and it was like, and then people be showing off their, like the, what they did with their Symbian 60 or whatever. And it was just awful. Right. So one could argue in some ways, like as it being Frank, right? Like blockchain experiences and like the usability of blockchains and like the capabilities of blockchains, like up until more or less now, like has been kind of awful. Right. It's sort of like, it's sort of like, here's this incredible, you know, these are like operating systems. They're competing for capabilities, developers and user capabilities, friendliness, et cetera. And I would very clearly say we have not yet achieved an iPhone moment of blockchain networks themselves.

SPEAKER_08: Wait, I want to, I want to push back on that because base, which is associated with Coinbase has been growing incredibly quickly. And I follow a lot of folks who build on crypto and I keep seeing more and more notes about base. And so to me, in my head, I was questioning, is this the kind of like iPhone moment, faster, cheaper, integrated backed well by a major company. So that was my impression. I don't think you're trying to say that it's not the iPhone moment, but you seem to think that we still aren't there yet. Is that fair?

SPEAKER_34: Well, there's so much still to be done, meaning like, and by the way, we're, we're huge fans of base.

SPEAKER_00: We have like all our products are supporting base and Coinbase is a key strategic partner in USDC. And so like, it is, it is great. And it's amazing what they've achieved. And like, I'm constantly retweeting cool stuff that they're doing and stuff. So it's, it's really good. But like, we need to be in a world where blockchain networks are not just supporting financial transactions. They're supporting social games, content, intellectual property. They're supporting provenance of data for AIs. They're supporting, you know, AI agent transaction flows or supporting retail scale applications, you know, digital tokens that are used in like super large mainstream application utilities, right? All this stuff. You can't do that today. You can't do it. Like the, the, the throughput's not there, everything falls over. So we're not scalable in that sense. We need to be able to get to millions of transactions per second on these networks over time. And that is achievable. And, um, and, and, and look, I think the, the whole paradigm for software engineers and developers and the user experience side of this is still quite early as well. So that's just sort of looking back in my own experience in sort of the maturation of platform software and developer experience and user experience. We're, we're not quite there. And I would agree though, that we're, we're getting darn close. Right. But in my mind, um, even if you get to a paradigm, let's say you have a blockchain that like really clicks, like we're still going to end up with kind of layers above that, that proliferate the number of networks that are out there. And so I do think we'll have a period of time, um, where, you know, there's this concept of like an app chain, which is like, you know, if I'm, if I'm, let's say I'm some large Asian internet company and I have 500 million users on my app. And I want to start using digital tokens and stable coins and smart contracts. Like, and I opened that up to my end users, like every, everything in the market today, which is collapsed. It just can't, it can't support that. But you can imagine a world where you have almost like virtual private clouds in AWS. You have kind of like these spun up infrastructures that are spun up as kind of these kind of connected blockchains network of networks type, type models, um, that, that support this scaling. And, you know, basically like all of that is, is sort of fragmentation and more infrastructure development. And we want to make sure as circle that our stable coin network protocols, which is USDC, URC, CCTP, other things that we're building in terms of like gas fee abstraction. There's a lot of stuff we're building that all of that, um, is a, is sort of abstracted away, uh, for, for users and developers. And we're going to continue to support the new ecosystems that come. So whether it's 15 or 50, I can't give you an, an exact number, but I, what I can say is we are continuing to build and deploy and launch our stable coin network infrastructure on more blockchain networks. And I don't know when, when, when that, you know, kind of reaches its iPhone moment or reaches the point of diminishing returns. I don't know. I don't know in terms of the question around currencies, um, we've obviously launched USDC and EURC. And, um, I can't say, you know, we're not going to launch other currencies, but what I would say is we're seeing all around the world. Whether it's in emerging markets or developed markets, we are seeing because stable coin laws are coming into effect. We're seeing high quality stable coin projects coming online in a ton of different places around the world. And so I think like 2025 will be a year where you see high quality, you know, peso stable coins and, you know, uh, yen stable coins and Aussie dollar stable coins and pound sterling stable coins. You're going to see more of these. We don't need to be the issuer of all of these different foreign currency stable coins. What we need though, is we need quality regulated firms that can build on the same kind of infrastructure that we've built up so that you have like really good interoperability. And so that the applications can be built that can use all these really easily. And so that's something that we're quite excited about. We've published a lot about on chain effects and what that could look like. And, um, you know, we're, we're, we're excited about the.

SPEAKER_15: The potential growth in, in additional currency stable coins, but right now we're quite content, uh, with, with dollars in Euro as circle products.

SPEAKER_118: Why would you see the Australian stable coin market, the Japanese yen stable coin market, the, I dunno, uh, the Swedish Kroner stable coin

SPEAKER_08: stablecoin market to another company when you already have the i mean the you have enough money you have you know a great brand you have experience you already know the regulators to some degree why would you let you know billy bob or jackie jane in australia come up with the um and what

SPEAKER_00: would that be like audc audc thank you i mean look you know there's just a there's there's like focus is one thing like we have to be focused um and and uh you know i think every every one of these is complex uh there's complex legal and regulatory issues the local preferences of say the central bank and other things play play a role um and you know we sort of think about like what's the market size you know how big of a market is this coming back to some of the discussion we had earlier like we genuinely believe that you know the role of the dollar in particular in this age of of of an internet financial system is going to grow and and you know i think it will be the biggest and so we we want to you know obviously keep a lot of our energy focus there while also enabling those kind of connection points and on and off ramps uh in in markets around the world and so we we we want to encourage that development um and i and i think we are encouraged by the developments that are happening um but we don't feel compelled that from a from a kind of business or ecosystem perspective

SPEAKER_08: that's something that we have to do and you can always buy them later you know if someone does all the work of building in a usdc and you know they're not going to become as big as a company doing usdc because there's fewer australian dollars out there in demand you can always just snap them up later who doesn't love a little tech company m a you know well apart from lena con

SPEAKER_21: but different topic all right so uh i went back in time and looked at the data from usdc's

SPEAKER_08: circulation its market cap if you will it was at the start of 2020 about 500 million dollars which was less than i actually kind of remembered uh by the end of 2021 it was 42.5 billion today it's in the 34 35 billion dollar range but a huge gross in um usdc circulation during the time in which interest rates were doing interesting things i made you a graphic jeremy i have lots of graphics i have lots of charts well this is one i made just for you and you can tell that i made it because it's the ugliest thing you've ever seen but this is the federal funds uh rate uh as you can see coronavirus time without zero rose very quickly the company as i understand it does better when money has more value because you're sitting on lots of reserves is that a fair statement not necessarily no um you know

SPEAKER_00: i i think um you know if you if you if you think about like monetary theory and from from both a central bank perspective and from a say a bank perspective um there's sort of this idea of a neutral interest rate and there's sort of a uh there's sort of a a the zero lower bound that we lived with for a while after the great financial crisis and and monetization of government debt and other things and then you had obviously like this sort of shock response to uh uh your sharp inflation and and and sort of a monetary tightening and we have these cycles obviously where you you you have kind of changes and but like the kind of nominal interest rates uh and or kind of neutral interest rates and where those land i think broadly um that concept of a neutral interest rate which some people today think might be around three percent or two point seven five percent or something like that where it's sort of neither restrictive nor uh or nor nor uh easing right is um is potentially like the ideal state and so whether you when you're a central bank or uh or a bank itself like high interest rates are not great like they're they're well yes there might be a some incremental income from sort of reserves or or deposits in a bank's case that comes from that um it's a restrictive environment there's less economic activity there's less money velocity in the economy there's less invested capital you know you know risk and so when when interest rates go down um you know yes the the actual like reserve income that we may receive on a unit basis may go down that is that is just factually true and obvious right but at the same time when the price of money gets cheaper money velocity picks up and capital investment picks up and economic velocity picks up and that's reflected in both risk capital in terms of like investment in market but it's also affected in the real economy the goal of that declining interest rate is to continue to get in real real in real investment in the real economy and those are supportive of a growth of a stable coin um you know so so we're we're you know we've been through different cycles we've been through an easy cycle we've been through a restrictive cycle and so now we're going to learn what a more moderate or uh uh cycle looks like maybe like we don't when no one can predict the future but um yeah i i think you know so i think our view is that um you know you have you have kind of multiple forces you have these macro forces that we don't control which is just like what the what the economy is doing and how central banks are responding like we just we have nothing to do with that on the other hand we have a platform network and we have a and we have user flywheels developer flywheels we're building this very high utility form of digital money we're building this really powerful developer platform that has its own intrinsic growth dynamics to it uh and that and that you know i believe when you think about the total addressable market of legal electronic money today which is on a global basis over a hundred trillion dollars like i believe that a a the the portion of that of that legal electronic money pie the portion of that that is sort of dollar stable coins and euro stable coins or sort of stable coins is going to grow it will grow over time um whatever the interest rate is right and so this is why i i look at this and say hey we're in the really early days here we're talking about only 160 billion dollars out of a hundred trillion that are in stable coins today so we're super early and if you if you think that like internet scale utility what it did for media or communications or for transportation or software distribution if you think that internet money and this kind of thing can be as transformative as those other things like we might see a world in 10 or 15 or 20 years where 10 of the world is uh is is in something like this like that's actually like when you think about internet markets and their growth like 10 percent is takes decades to get to that but in in the next one to two decades i do think we could see a world where 10 of money is like stable coin money um and that would be extraordinary and you

SPEAKER_91: know we hope to be an important part of it okay so let's bring that chart back up and probably you

SPEAKER_08: just said against this because i think it's actually very illustrative of the dynamics at play here so um if you're watching the video of this uh i added some arrows green is when the fed's raising rates red's when they're going down and then the blue dots are different financial moments from from circle the first blue dot is the uh initial spac um filing and then the second blue dot is the repricing of the spac and then the third blue dot is the end of the spac and then the fourth blue dot is the company announcing earlier this year that it is filed privately to go public and you might be surprised given the relationship between holding reserves and interest rates higher rates hold reserves more money that circle was putting together a spec deal when rates were zero but to jeremy's point economic activity at that point was so high stable coins were enjoying their first peak if i guess if you will the 2021 era so it sounds jeremy like money was inexpensive things were very active that was great for circle because everyone was buying civil coins and now when rates are higher you might make more money in the short term but if you want to grow the pie as much as you can and the longer term uh more economic activity is better than more near-term cash flow ergo lower rates

SPEAKER_23: could yield a bigger company down the road i think it's a good conceptual model i think that's that is

SPEAKER_08: exactly the right conceptual model okay so in that case then my point but i was going to ask you you know rates are going to go down soon are you concerned but it sounds more like you would frame

SPEAKER_34: that as a very short term or near term my my view yeah my view has been for you know quite some time

SPEAKER_00: now that rates need to come down it's it's critical that rates need to come down um because because i i think it is it is ultimately uh we we need to ensure that there's a healthy economic environment and um

SPEAKER_01: um and and and so you know i've been i've been of that view you know for for some time and i think the

SPEAKER_00: market's been of that view as well i mean you know so you know the markets uh you know you know obviously banks stablecoin issuers like circle i think we're all of the view that you know a we need we need to see

SPEAKER_01: lower rates to sustain the economy and uh to create an environment that is a better environment for entrepreneurs a better environment for small businesses a better environment for large

SPEAKER_00: companies a better environment for capital that needs to be invested for growth for long-term growth um when you when you have more money at rest and you have more money on the sidelines and you have you know people who don't want to take risk which is how economic growth happens people take risk you know they they sort of say hey i want to build a new factory i want to open a new restaurant i want to hire more employees like we want to we want to encourage that and lower interest rates are really critical to that and i think also really important to the growth of of um of the internet

SPEAKER_08: financial system yeah it's interesting how much this feels like we're having a quasi central banking conversation even though we're not because circle sits in in such like the center of an economic web of different entities that we have to talk about secondary effects and so forth it's we do i wish we had like two more hours to just riff about the future of money and so forth but we we don't i do want to look ahead though a little bit we've talked about regulations around the world and i saw you guys had a hey honestly i'm gonna say i slickly produced a hero video of you talking about regulations and coffee and purchasing and so forth um audio quality was fantastic 10.2 engineers for nailing that uh but what is the state of of regulations here in the u.s and how optimistic are you that we are not

SPEAKER_00: going to fumble the bag as it were yeah i i remain very optimistic about it and and you know look we're now like in the thick of a presidential election cycle um and so kind of you know all bets are off for the next eight weeks or whatever it is for for for anything happening in anything um yes um so so so obviously a lot a lot of the attention is is on sort of what are going to be the policy agendas of either you know a trump or a harris administration and and all that jazz but i think there's been a huge amount

SPEAKER_01: of work in the united states with multiple stakeholders on payment stablecoin the payment stablecoin act

SPEAKER_00: which is sort of um you know in a in in my view in a fairly mature state bipartisanship uh in in in the house and i think also from senate leadership i think we've seen great engagement from the administration the white house the treasury department um uh the fed and it's something that has been set as a priority by the administration uh to get done for a couple of years and i think um a a lot of the the kind of key things that needed to be thought through and how to do this in a way which supports uh you know private sector innovation the kind of safety and soundness characteristics that are necessary making sure that the fed plays an important role in fact a critical role in establishing the standards for what dollar stablecoins are but also giving um a pathway to you know state uh based issuers and regulators sort of like the dual banking system today you could be a state chartered bank or a federally chartered bank so creating a kind of model for that and um you know there's been a huge amount of work and i'm i'm quite confident that we will see uh payment stablecoin act uh become law i i'm not you know i'm i'm not a prognosticator on that but it seems like everyone wants to see that happen and it's it's still possible that could happen uh inside of this congress uh potentially in the lame duck uh session um but uh you know that all depends on you know presidential election outcomes and um but this is you know even maxine waters just said publicly i think in the last week like if if she were to be chair of the committee if they if they won the house on the democratic side like this is on you know top of her list so or near the top of her list you know and it and frank it's the top of the list for patrick mchenry and the republicans as well so i think you know you're you're seeing um you're you're seeing a lot of desire to to get that

SPEAKER_08: done so let's say that uh circle goes public and forget all the details that are off just assume public for a second and the government shows up and starts buying shares because euro you're buying their debt you're doing their digital currency for them essentially and they start buying shares in the company would that make you comfortable or uncomfortable yeah i've never given a thought to

SPEAKER_01: that um and um i i actually i don't know if governments really even do that like i i have no i

SPEAKER_08: have no idea so they don't so is is that question but i think you guys are such an interesting company that's working with such an interesting currency and the potential to become so large that i think we're going to have to ask new questions down the road this is this is a five or ten year point to be clear but there's so much interesting stuff that could come as like a public-private partnership if you will between governments currencies and stablecoin providers like i can see the australian

SPEAKER_00: government supporting a private company that was yeah i mean look the financial system is highly regulated and it's it's sort of like the energy system is highly regulated our transportation systems

SPEAKER_01: are are highly regulated our space travel systems are highly regulated the production of medicines are

SPEAKER_00: highly regulated like most technologies and significant infrastructure in society are highly regulated like the software industry is sort of had an epic of like 30 years where it was not highly regulated but now if you're doing anything really big and really interesting with software whether it's ai or you know you're you're applying it with hardware and self-driving cars or you're building a a global digital currency system or whatever it is like if you're if you're doing things that kind of intersect into these kind of highly regulated spaces that have these really big impacts on society that makes sense like i'm not of the view like hey like this is you know if it becomes really important to society and their particular kind of covenants and like a social contract that needs to be in place around what you do and whatnot like that that's that is what exists today and so there are different levels of of regulation there's sort of very light regulation there's heavier regulation and you know we have like global systemically important banks and those are more highly regulated than you know the wichita community bank or whatever it is right you know so if what we're building you know becomes you know systemically important or or what have you then we're going to have a different relationship with not just the us government but other other governments as well these are way off in the future things because this is definitely not that today uh we're nowhere close to that um but um what we are focused on is obviously we have a vision for what an internet financial system can look like we have a vision for what open programmable composable money can bring to the world and and the innovation of that and the open internet and what that makes possible and we want to make sure that that can come to life and and not be stifled and that and that does require policy makers and and governments to to to

SPEAKER_01: actually create more degrees of freedom um for innovation to happen um as has happened in other uh

SPEAKER_08: you know major areas of the internet i tried to frame the question in the most neutral positive way possible because i was trying to get away from what the chinese government does with golden shares and so forth and more like the government might want to be a partner in more ways than one in that question but i agree we're a long ways out uh okay before i let you go you guys filed privately to go public uh as you and i both know we're staring down the last couple weeks for an election and uh i'm presuming that you guys won't be pulling the trigger before the election um what can you tell us about the vibe

SPEAKER_00: about when you guys might decide to list yeah i can't comment on any open you know regulatory filings or matters there's one thing i can say which is that you know um we are very committed to being a us listed uh you know uh publicly traded company and a big part of our success as a company has to do with the trust and transparency that we have that we've provided in in what we do and that we believe that if you're facing usdc as a user or as a business or as a financial company and you know you you want

SPEAKER_01: that trust and transparency and being held to the standards of u.s public company standards the transparency the accountability the government governance the ethics all that is very important

SPEAKER_15: to continuing to build on what we've already done and so we're committed to that um and we believe it's it's a really important step for us as a company oh i i agree with all that i think going

SPEAKER_08: public is a great thing i don't know why it became um you know business persona non grata amongst a lot of unicorns today but i think it's great transparency shared upside in the public just everyone gets a bit more visibility and i think it's great especially for companies uh like circle so we will talk to you again um in and around ipo time we'll see when that is um but jeremy thank you so much for dropping by twist yet again as always i learned quite a lot we appreciate it uh if you're not following us on your podcasting platforms do that we're on youtube we go live we have lots of fun my name is alex we'll see you guys soon goodbye