Circle CEO: The Entire Financial System Is Coming Onchain (We’re Still Early)

0:00Jeremy, welcome to show Jeremy. This is your show, it's your world. Thank you. Thank you, Jeremy. Congratulations. Thank you. Absolutely. What a day, Jeremy. What a day. I mean, look, you started off your talk at the top in the keynote, and you just spoke about this reality that we're entering, which is just this new economy. And specifically about this bifurcated economy, or perhaps that's the way that it's been talked about. But you stated this economy is not going to be a split economy. It's going to be on-chain. It's going to be on-arc. Talk to us about your vision here for arc, the agentsic economy, and what's really happening here. Yeah, I mean, it's stuff we've been thinking about in some ways, for a very long time. Like what got me into this whole space 13 years ago was the idea that these networks were going to be computers, and that you're going to be able to put software machines on these computers. And if you could actually put real assets, like dollars, obviously, and contracts, that you can actually

1:03kind of construct a software-powered economy. And so like the founding vision was just like there's like software-powered communications, commerce, media on the internet, like a software-powered economics system would be possible. And so in many ways, like we've been pulling that thread and kind of working on different pieces, finding arc is in many ways like it's the full manifestation of that founding vision. We're creating an operating system. It's a network operating system. Its purpose is to run the full slate of economic activity, not just moving money around, but actually the contracts that run the economy, the decisions that have to be made, the governance mechanism, all these mechanisms that we think about as the building box of a firm or an economy can come online. But then it's this convergence of these other operating systems, probably the most powerful operating systems ever created ever, which is intelligence operating

2:04systems, which are extraordinary. And they need each other. And so I think our idea is like the agentic economy is these two different operating systems. And they're basically two sides of the same coin. The agentic system is these intelligent systems and the economic operating systems like ARC provide the trust and verifiability. And the actual execution environment for the economic stuff. And in a world of proliferating agents, where agents can do things, not just for us as individuals, but actually we reconstruct what a firm even is. We reconstruct the firm as these orchestrations of agents doing work, the corporations we create are governed on chain. And you get this incredible proliferation of output that's possible from that. And so I think it's the most exciting thing. And Chris Dixon and I were talking about it too, it's like there's going to be these new types of corporations that are there's not the people, obviously.

3:06But a lot of it is going to be AI. And they need this layer. And we're building for that. And I think I genuinely believe it's not just that like developers have AI tools to build stuff faster. It's that actually what they're putting out there are AI agents themselves. I think you're describing an intelligent economy. And broadly, this is an intelligence revolution. And you're describing that it is applicable to not only the economy, every company is going to implement this. And we are going to see the collective ultimately create this step function, which I think arc is exemplary of, it is a step function increase in blockchains. And I think, Andy and I were talking about this before you joined here, which is that you had the benefit of hindsight. There's been so many blockchains that have come before. All of that is a learning moment. And now arc has been a leapfrog. Very similar to the way AI models leapfrog went another. You've been able to leapfrog all of the blockchains that have come before. And it truly feels that arc is a next generation blockchain.

4:08I mean, I really hope so. And I think I use the analogy of like mobile. Like there's 15 years of people building mobile, including massive companies, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, all these guys all around the world, the Palm Pilot, the Blackberry. And like everyone thought they had mobile. Everyone's like, oh, I've got mobile. I've got apps I can do this stuff. But it wasn't it hadn't really actualized. And then it was like the breakthrough of Android and iOS, like these these new operating systems. These new operating systems created the surface area, created the user experience, created the developer experience. Enough things converge at the right time that they could pull together, that then they created an environment where people can create incredible new things. And that's how I think about what we're doing with art. I really genuinely do. I think this is an amazing environment for people who want to create and build. And we really feel like we did have the benefit of hindsight. We've seen, we have the most cross platform app in the world

5:09in blockchain, USTC is the most cross platform thing out there. So we care about it that we know about that. And that's actually even interesting. Interoperability is a deep, deep, deep part of art. If you use your asset on art, you can ride on CCP and distribute your asset to over 20 networks. So even, we do, even, you know, art, we want to run a lot on. But like people are going to distribute stuff all around the world in other places too. Yeah. And I think the mobile analogy is a great one because it describes the technology that is truly general and flexible enough to support non-sqmorphic use cases. Yes. And so what you're describing, I mean, the unique advantages, we have it here. Gas and digital dollars, sub-second finality, opt-in privacy, post-quantum resilience, agent ready, and assets and interrupt. These are unique value propositions that make art different from other blockchains. Those are what make you art unique. My question is, what is the implications?

6:09What is now possible because art has implemented these unique advantages? Well, I mean, like, you know, we've all talked about, like, when does the actual financial system come onto these networks? And we've needed these things. You know, the companies that want to do it, like they need privacy. Like they need an operational environment where they're not dealing with volatile cryptocurrencies. You know, they need to know that the infrastructure is like robust and operated as a financial market utility infrastructure. You know, now today, they need to know that when they're building a deploying, it has like safety harness, security harness, an AI tooling that's all right there. And so it's sort of meeting the mainstream where it is. And we've been listening to that, you know, for years. And USDC gave us a front row seat. Yup. Because that was the first place institutions were coming. They were like, okay, we now have a regulated way to like move money around. And like, that was the first place that they were coming. And then like tokenized assets started coming.

7:11And all those integrating with USDC. So we've been close to this for a very long time. And I think it's just like listening to the market, listening to customers. Yeah. You know, just kind of bail about what Rob's question and your answer here, Jeremy, you're kind of putting together quite the puzzle here. You started with USDC in circles, grown to a enormous size, right? 99.6% of all X4 or two transactions on USDC, right? You'd expanded this now globally, right? You've done the regulated path. You've got the right way. Obviously clarity would have been an amazing thing. Yesterday, but here we are. We still move forward with innovation exemptions from the SDC and CFTC. Now you've got ARC. There's also a bit of the OS system that speak out. What are you really building? You're not just building a stablecoin. You're not just building a blockchain. What is the bigger picture? I know I kind of asked at the top, but what the part thing got now?

8:11What are you really constructed for this company? You know, like when I started the company and got started, like my mental model was, there's internet technology platform companies and they have a mixture of things. They run platforms, they run applications, they run like core services and they're all anchored in different areas. So you had like commerce was anchored around Amazon and like communications was anchored around Facebook and like information discovery and knowledge was anchored around Google. And productivity was anchored around Microsoft and mobile was anchored around Apple. At least these tech, these big tech companies were all anchored around like their core utility. And my belief back then was if this plays out, there's going to be internet platform companies that are anchored around the economic system

9:11and the financial system. And there'll be internet scale platform utilities that are in the same way that those companies change communications and media and commerce and software and so on. I think there's an opportunity to do that with the financial and economic system. And I believe that that sort of stands as a big opportunity. I don't think we're like the only company like that. There's going to be a lot of, I think, a number of great internet platform companies that are building the economy of the future. There's some great amazing companies. But that's what I think we see. And so we want to provide that platform infrastructure. We want to provide the best digital assets. We want to build applications that are useful for people. But in order for this to work, it has to be unlike the centralized platform in the world, it has to be something that is broadly participated in. The ownership of it, the distribution of it, the value of creation, the governance.

10:13And so ARC is very, very different than a traditional internet technology model because it is built on the ideology of blockchain networks and open source and things like that. And so it's a different take on that and something again, we've learned a lot from the last 10, 15 years as well. Yeah, I mean, Jamie, I can't help but to think this, the evolution of what ARC's going to look like. It's going to look a lot more like an alternative financial ecosystem rather than just a crypto asset, crypto only ecosystem. 100%. We're starting with USDC as a foundation. We're going to have tokenized assets. We're going to have assets, currencies. We've got to talk about what this is. Yeah, I mean, look, I think like one of the things is, I think we issue some of the world's leading assets, the biggest digital dollar, the biggest digital euro, the biggest tokenized money market fund. We now have tokenized Bitcoin, so we should see, which is really exciting and is anchored in our national trust bank and the custody there,

11:15bankruptcy remote, it's like a great programable Bitcoin. But the number of people who are issuing tokenized equities, day one, there's a whole bunch, the DTCC, which is the heart and soul of securities in the global financial system coming to AR, the biggest asset manager issuing their assets on ARC. There's like 12 or 16 foreign currency stable points launching on ARC, there's an FX primitive on ARC. There's ETFs, bond issuers, credit issuers, so we're seeing all of these different categories coming and that's very exciting. And we're obviously at the very start. But I think if there's an asset to be tokenized, it should be on ARC and we give asset issuers something very, very powerful. We give them the best liquidity against digital dollars in the world because of our role with the USDC and the way that USDC works on ARC and we give them distribution. Because if I'm BlackRock and I issue a tokenized ETF on ARC,

12:18I can choose, I want to make it available on Hyper EVM. I want to make it available on base. I want to make it available on Solana. I want to make it available in these places and it manages that distribution and liquidity across those because CCP is the biggest inter-op highway on blockchain. And so we just open the highway and everyone else's cars basically. Yeah, Jeremy, I first of all, I just want to say man, hyperlippery on the balance sheet of circle is an absolute Chad move, man. Awesome. As we come to a wrap, Jeremy, just thinking about kind of where we go from here. Yeah, go. Ending on 2026, stablecoin supply outstanding, relatively stagnant. But as you and I know, this is maybe your fourth cycle with my third, a flat stablecoin supply in a bear market is a good thing. That is okay, right? Yeah, I mean, like, I mean, we talk, people in the public market ask us about this all this. Like, we've seen some decoupling, right? So stablecoin utility and payments and settlement

13:18has grown and grown and grown. When there's not as much risk cap at all, so that's more static. But the stablecoin supply has been pretty steady. And the stablecoin payment volumes are growing. And so we're seeing like the transaction volumes on so many different fronts growing. And so that's great, right? That's fundamental utility. And actually, we talked about this after our last earnings, which was, we had a record amount of minting and redemption. And that's important because, you know, if you've got, you know, $150 billion minted and $150 billion redeemed, that's liquid pipes. It means money can easily come in and out and it's interoperability with the financial system. And so it shows that the liquidity and the interoperability with real-world payment systems is working and growing. And that's really, that's what matters to you. And so there's evidence. There's $100 trillion in USD transfer volume all the time in totality.

14:19And so you don't get there with a fluke. Yeah, you get there with your product market fit, exactly what you're describing. You've gone through exponential growth. And we're very, very pleased to be a part of it. Congratulations on our last few months. Thank you so much. So glad you guys could be here today. You guys were on, thank you, James. Really awesome. I hope you've got to chat with a lot of good people. Yeah, man. Yeah, man. We were great to see you, buddy. Come on. I get it. Take care of you guys. Take care of you guys. Thanks so much.