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Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Money After AI: Meet the New Digital Dollar Built for the Internet "Stablecoins" w/ Jeremy Allaire, Emad Mostaque & Salim Ismail | EP #200
01:30:26
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- [00:01]
A
There's a lot of conversation going on around the world, a lot of chatter about the potential of the US losing its position as the global reserve currency.
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B
What can the United States do about it? And that's where stablecoins come in. Jeremy Allaire is here. He's the co founder and CEO of Circle. We think that the world needs a full reserve banking system. We think that the world needs much safer base layer money, and that's what stablecoins represent.
- [00:26]
A
When you deposit, say a million dollars into a bank, what happens?
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B
They're borrowing a dollar from you and then they're permitted to lend it out 12 times.
- [00:34]
A
That's insane.
- [00:35]
B
That's what fractional reserve banking is. One of the motivations for starting Circle was, okay, is there a way to have full reserve payment system money separated from lending money? We could construct that on the Internet, actually. And in fact, it's totally necessary.
- [00:49]
C
On the Internet, money's about to go from static to supercharged. You've talked to lots of central bankers. Are they even aware about what's coming?
- [00:57]
B
The really smart people are like, oh, my go. Now that's a moonshot.
- [01:04]
A
Ladies and gentlemen, everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with my moonshot mates, Salim Ismail and Imad Mustak. I'm Peter Diamandis. And today a special guest, a new friend, someone I hope to have in my life for many decades to come. Jeremy Allaire. He's best known as the co founder, chairman and CEO of Circle, the company behind the stablecoin USDC. By the numbers, USDC has market cap of $76 billion, over 90% year on year growth and this past Summer did an IPO and raised $1 billion. Welcome, Jeremy. It's a pleasure.
- [01:42]
B
Thank you, Peter. I'm psyched to hang out with you guys.
- [01:45]
A
Yeah. I like to call what you've done at Circle an overnight success after 12 years of hard work.
- [01:51]
B
Yes.
- [01:52]
A
Let me, let me set the goal here for our listeners. So the way our banking system works today is kind of insane when you look at it. And I hope to dissect that with you at the end of the podcast today. My hope is that our listeners are going to understand why stablecoins on the blockchain are the future of money, the future of payments and transactions. And while stablecoins, while they're safer, they're also more ethical and operate Internet speeds. And finally, I want to discuss why America needs stablecoins. So that sound good to you?
- [02:25]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we can, we can bridge off of that into A lot of adjacencies as well that hopefully will be, you know, build on that too.
- [02:33]
A
I think we should begin with a definition on stablecoins and usdc. Do you want to take a shot or should I?
- [02:41]
B
I'm happy to. Yeah, I'm happy to. I've been thinking about this a long time.
- [02:45]
A
I think so.
- [02:46]
B
And the semantics of all this. So look, there are a lot of things that call themselves stablecoins. And so what I don't want to do is try and describe the entire topology of things that are stable in name only or whatnot. And so I'm going to use a more narrow definition. And actually that narrow definition is now really being enshrined in law all around the world. So the major governments of the world are actually enshrining this definition of stablecoins in law as they codify this as a form of legal electronic money in the global financial system. So I'm going to use that narrower definition. So in our conception, a stablecoin is a representation of a fiat denominated currency, such as a dollar, a euro, rmb, yen, et cetera. It is a representation of a fiat denominated currency as a cryptocurrency. So operating on the Internet on public networks, on these public Internet networks, colloquially known as blockchain networks. So operating on these public networks, and they're notable in that they're not just denominated in fiat, they are actually fully backed and fully reserved by such fiat currency. And there's a lot of nuance in there which we can get into. But fundamentally it is a backed one for one. So that when you have one of these stable coins, well a, they're stable, meaning that you can always create them or redeem them for the unit, a dollar, a euro, et cetera. So you always have that one for one creation and redemption. And so therefore the mechanism by which you get the stability is that full reserve. So they're designed to be very safe, safer than commercial bank money, forms of digital currency, but that then operate on the public Internet and inherit all of the public Internet's superpowers, which we've all come to love, which is openness, interoperability, global reach, programmability, with marginal costs of moving things that approach zero and move at the speed of the Internet. So that is what stablecoins are. And the, the legal term in the United States under recently passed federal law is what is called a payment. Stablecoin, meaning it's good for payment, it's money good to settle a transaction.
- [05:20]
A
Basically every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends ten years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmandis.com metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. I appreciate that you probably did a better job than I could have. What I'd like to do one second is open with this question. There's a lot of conversation going on around the world, a lot of chatter about the potential of the US losing its position as the global reserve currency, especially as China, India and Russia are getting together. My question is do you think that stablecoins could help play a role in maintaining the US dominance as a global reserve currency and stabilize that and back that in some fashion?
- [06:48]
B
Yeah, so I think that currencies have network effects and they have network effects from their adoption and utility and they have network effects from their liquidity. And the dollar basically got plugged into the payment systems of the world after World War II and became sort of a required settlement asset for trade and therefore it gained enormous liquidity. And so that liquidity and that kind of network utility has been very strong. And so that's been the basis of the dollar for a long time. But then after 1971 something profound happened which I think we all know about, which is the fiat currency, the dollar, which kind of had a global consensus behind it. It was somewhat imposed because the US kind of won World War II, but somewhat imposed the dollar, it depegged from gold is one way to think about it. So it had been a gold backed currency and it was kind of considered credibly neutral. As a result, you had the gold there and then the dollar was this sort of unit of account and governments kind of maintained their own pegs to the dollar which Implicitly meant they were pegged to some amount of gold. And because of ballooning deficits in the 1960s, because of the war that was being waged in Vietnam, Richard Nixon sort of said okay, well we no longer have the money, so we don't avid and so we're going to break and we're going to create a government issued money by fiat. It was just we say it's the money. So fiat currency, which goes way back historically the concept of fiat. But fiat currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. Most of monetary history was commodity backed in some way. There are lots of examples of detethering from that. No pun intended. But the, you know, you have this break and then the currency basically became about the full faith and credit. That's this phrase we know. It's the full faith and credit and.
- [09:08]
A
Battleships and armed forces.
- [09:10]
B
Yes, full faith and credit and yes. And the sovereign power and sovereign credit worthiness. For most countries it's sovereign credit worthiness. Like whether you buy an Argentinian bond or South African bond doesn't have to do with their military. It has to do with the credit worthiness of the government. And so I think there's been these shifts globally as you referenced in geoeconomic powers and arguably rising hard power as well. And we've seen that hard power exercise like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We see hard power exercise in other places. But you've had this question for some time which has been on people's minds and in particular became exacerbated after Russia invaded Ukraine and the United States government basically went to all the utilities that are part of the dollar network. The actual like these are like software utilities. Like Swift is a software utility. It's a messaging standard that broadcasts messages around the world. And it's who has access to that messaging protocol is who has access to settle money. And not only did they kind of intervene in that. The U.S. government intervened in that. It also like grabbed things from, you know, basically put a lock on database records which is really what, you know if someone holds T bills or holds your read access has been blocked. Right. So read access was blocked for Russia to a whole bunch of stuff. And so that freaked people out. It like really freaked people out. It was like wait a minute. This dependable consensus based international system where full faith and credit is. Okay, there's some question marks about that. And then at the same time we've been in a world where there's these. You talk about exponential tech, we could talk about exponential debt. We've had exponenting debt and exponenting debt is like a real issue. And so the bitcoin adherence, and I happen to be a bitcoin adherent as well, are looking at like sovereign debt as a real issue. And so the full faith in credit part becomes challenging. And so all of this is kind of combined into asking this bigger question of is the role of the dollar waning? If you read the 500 Year History by Ray Dalio, they'll tell you it is, et cetera, right? So you can kind of look at this from some of these angles. Debt super cycles, the geoeconomics, geopolitical environment, et cetera. And all of this kind of comes back to your question, which is what can the United States do about it? There's the obvious stuff which is become more neutral or less intentional in terms of control. That's a policy choice. It can have less debt. And that does not seem to be a politically viable choice in the United States right now. As you guys talk about all the time, we're going to have insane levels of GDP output from AI and we're just going to basically grow our way out of it. That's one philosophy. We're going to grow our way out of it. And so therefore don't be worried about the debt. And so keep buying U.S. treasuries because they're going to be good in 10 years, because we're going to be so productive in 10 years. But then there's this other question which is, well, wait a minute, there isn't an alternative. There's a lot of noise about alternatives. There's noise about BRICs and noise about brics currencies, but the trade settlement in dollars is still 60 some percent, even higher, maybe as high as 80%. And so the question is, well, is there something that the United States can do that can support demand for U.S. treasuries and continue to strengthen the network effects that it already has? And so that's where the Internet comes in, and that's where stablecoins come in. And the US famously liberalized and commercialized the Internet and exported software utilities made principally by American companies everywhere in the world on the public Internet. I think the question is now similar with AI foundation models or with Internet financial infrastructure like stablecoin financial infrastructure, blockchain infrastructure. Can the United States kind of create a liberal free market, competitive regulatory regime and export all of this globally and cement its role not just in the AI arms race, but in this financial utility arms race? And that's effectively what the policy position of the US Government is right now. That is what the genius act represents. And so the fundamental argument is, well, let's just make dollars, have higher utility by allowing them to kind of compete on the basis of free circulating digital currency on the Internet. And let's let technology driven companies be the primary IP generators, innovators to kind of continue to evolve these open software stacks to, to, to kind of lead this. And that would essentially continue to protect, if you will, bolster the US and bolster the US dollar. So that's a long winded answer, but I think it's important framing. I appreciate this.
- [14:26]
A
Saleem, do you want to jump in?
- [14:27]
D
I have a specific question for you which I'm seeing a vector here which could be very exciting, but is USDC exclusively backed by T bills or are there other assets and how do you back it today?
- [14:39]
B
Yeah, so USDC is, I would argue, and Circle itself is sort of one of the most transparent financial institutions that's ever been created. If you go to, I don't know what bank you use, you don't need to tell me, but let's say you bank with Chase or Wells Fargo or I don't know what you bank with, right. If you went and said I want a real time view or a daily view into every instrument that backs the fractional reserve loans that relates to the dollar obligations that you have to me, you're not going to get that. And in fact, if the Fed and Treasury said to the bank we want to see all that, they couldn't put that together for you. The books and records are hard and auditors are just sampling data to get the audits done. So what we've done is we've constructed a model where essentially 90% of what backs USDC at any given time, sometimes it's 85, sometimes it's 93, but let's just call it approximating. 90% is in a structure which we call the Circle Reserve Fund, which we created in, in collaboration with BlackRock. And effectively what it does is it creates a publicly listed structure called usdxx. You could do a little Google search or whatever and it'll bring you to a page on BlackRock and you can look inside that daily and you can see every single instrument that's there. And what you'll find in that 90% is it's primarily short duration US government treasury bonds. So it's all 90 days or less. But an average duration you could probably tell me because it tells you in real time on there. I haven't looked at it, but sometimes it's 10 days, 13 days. 14 days, very, very short duration averages. And it's treasury over collateralized repo, which for those that aren't familiar, that is essentially giant banks take cash from, they borrow cash from us overnight. So we give them our cash and then they give us more than that amount of cash in T bills. So we have over collateralized overnight obligations from banks. And so if the bank can't pay us back, we have the T bills, we're good and it's over collateralized. So it's sort of, sort of all what I'll call fundamentally short term government obligation risk. And then you also see in there, there's cash and you can see in there where the cash is. All the cash that's in that fund is with bank of New York Mellon. Bank of New York Mellon. All they do is they do a lot of things I don't want to diminish, but they are like the biggest custodian of cash. They have this incredible infrastructure. They custody $44 trillion of assets. So you have, they're known as the bankers bank, they're known as the banker's bank. So we bank with the bankers bank. And then the other 10%, about 98% of that 10% is held with bankers banks, meaning the BNY mellons of the world, the state streets of the world, companies like that. And then we have a little bit which we basically position around the world in also high quality banks, but also a little bit with fintech banks to provide kind of immediate liquidity. So that if I'm in Singapore or I'm in Brazil and I want to create a USDC from a local bank, I can do that basically 24 7. That's what is actually there. That's somewhat of a long answer, but the short answer is it's T bills, it's what's called treasury repo and it's cash. And we by the way, despite people saying unregulated, all this sort of stuff, obviously there's a genius act, but we're also under a framework imposed by the most intense regulator of Wall street, which is actually the New York Department of Financial Services, who has a set of specified assets that we are only allowed to hold. So we have to hold ourselves to the Wall street regulator.
- [18:37]
D
I've been watching Circle for since its founding and I got to hand it.
- [18:41]
A
To you, you should have invested as a founder.
- [18:43]
D
Well, the sheer perseverance you've had to navigate all, all of this regulatory bureaucracy, this is like Nobel Prize winning stuff.
- [18:54]
B
That was what made this exciting to me. I Mean, Jeremy, what did you put.
- [18:57]
A
The chances at Founding Day that you'd get to today? Honestly, would you?
- [19:02]
B
I didn't really think. I don't think. I mean, I don't think probabilistically because you can't, you can't do that as a founder. Like, it's, it's all or nothing, right? You know, you have this conviction, you have a vision, you see what you're, you want to do, you know, it's possible, and then you just fight like hell to realize it. Like, that is, that's mission. And so that's how I thought it. But I did want to say, Salim, to your comment. I built Internet software companies, platform infrastructure companies. Nothing at this scale, but I originally had studied kind of global political economy, international political economy. My academic background was not computer science or technical finance or anything like that. And when I kind of looked at this problem space really almost 13 years ago, I was like, man, in order to actually realize the ideas, it's going to require changing global policy and then having that global policy kind of get cemented by the major governments of the world. And I thought to myself, that sounds really hard. That sounds extremely hard. And I'm up for doing something really hard at this stage in my career because I think, you know, I think with a lot of these exponential tech, like, it changes society and it changes the rules and it changes what's possible. And you got to change the laws because if you don't, you can't do the thing. These adaptations require that. And so it's actually very motivating to me.
- [20:36]
A
So. But you did the tech, you built the tech first and didn't change the policy first. I think that is something critically important, right? You, you built.
- [20:46]
B
Well, a little bit of both. A little bit of both, right? Because like, you know, actually I was, I was just doing a session at the annual meeting of the World bank of the IMF just today. I'm in D.C. and you know, 12 years ago, almost to the day, it was November, I was called to testify to the US Senate about this issue of like, can virtual currencies, as they were called back then, can they exist, what's the innovation potential, et cetera? And I was advocating hard for policy at that point. And I would say, while we built the tech before I put a single dollar in the company, before my investors put a single dollar in the company, I hired the very best regulatory policy advisors in the world to basically help me figure out, how are we going to do this, what's the thread we can Pull to. To do this in a legal way, in a compliant way. And, and we figured that out and. But what that meant, though, is that while maybe there weren't stablecoin regulations because stablecoins didn't really exist, there was a body of law around payment systems, electronic money, all these things. And what it meant is that to do what we needed to do, we had to be constantly working with policymakers, working with regulators, collaborating with them at every moment. And I think that posture has never changed and it continues to this day.
- [22:18]
D
You couldn't have made it otherwise, right? Because you're otherwise. It's so easy for them to go, wait a minute, he's trying to act like a central bank. Enough of this. And slam the door on you.
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A
Iman, do you want to jump in?
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C
Yeah. No. I think it's amazing what you've kind of done over the years, perseverance, especially through the dark times. And now it's really interesting because the regulation tailwind is there. But then also you've got AI agents literally hitting right now who are possibly the biggest users of AI and stablecoins ever. And you guys have been doing great work with x402 and SDKs and things like that. I'm really curious, how much of your volume do you reckon in five years is going to be AI versus humans?
- [22:59]
B
Interesting. Yeah, I think about this a lot just for a little bit of historical context. The really inspiring thing when Sean and I were co founding the company, SEAN NEVILLS CO FOUNDER when we were CO founding the company back in 2013, is what got us really excited was this idea of programmable money. It was just an idea on napkins, so to speak. Back then there were some papers that some really incredible people had put out about smart contracts. And I got very excited that these blockchain networks could become like distributed compute engines. And that I had worked on virtual machines, programming languages, I'd worked on application infrastructure, built some of the most popular app servers in the early days of the Internet. And I was very excited about this idea of these kind of trust machines, these distributed compute engines that could provide cryptographically verifiable compute outputs and inputs and data and transactions. That was like the bomb that was like, oh, man, if we have that, we can actually move economic activity in a broader based sense, not just moving point value from point A to point B, but economic activity more broadly. We could actually move that onto the Internet and we could reconceptualize all the building blocks of the economic system. And like, that's what motivated us? And so like the first thing we were like, okay, well we got to get a protocol for dollars on the Internet going because like we got to get that going. And we need these, we need these networks to become compute engines where you could actually build a protocol layer that's like an application utility layer. And like we got that five years in with Ethereum. And so we got this going, we got the legal going, we got the technology going, we wired it up to the financial system. But that was like the super primitive first ideas that we had. And so now those are coming around. And to your question, so I'm going to answer it, which is I think the vast majority of stablecoin transactions are going to be AI intermediated in five years. And I think we're entering a period where economic operating systems are being created and these layer one blockchain networks are, are becoming economic operating systems. They're designed to contain economic activity, provable data transactions and compute that is necessary for entities that face each other in a trustless way. That could be AI agents that face each other and need proving systems basically to prove identity. Yes, but to prove inputs and outputs and other things and they need to be globally interoperable. It needs to be. If there's an AI agent spun up out of somewhere in Asia and there's an AI agent spun up from wherever, I mean where is sort of all relative anyway? But like these, these agents that are increasingly agents with capital are, are conducting work. Maybe they're bringing in humans, maybe humans are bringing them in. It's both ways. But like the intermediation on that has to happen on an infrastructure like this. There's no infrastructure, there's no other infrastructure not having over like credit card networks. Right. So it's happening on this kind of infrastructure because it needs to be highly scalable from microtransactions, which is, you know, we just released a toolkit for microtransactions with X4, by the way.
- [26:28]
A
I love microtransactions. I mean, talk about the number of times I wanted to donate small amounts, you know.
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B
Yeah, hither, Yeah. I mean, yeah, but it's like, it's scalable. I use the metaphor like, you know, like email. SMTP does not care about the payload. Right. If I send you an email with an attachment of a picture of my breakfast and you send me an email back with a copy of a CAA dossier, the payload is clearly different, but they're both 100 bytes or whatever it is. So the payload's the same, the same thing with stablecoin money. I can settle a 5 cent transaction on a high performance layer, one blockchain in a fraction of a second. And that 5 cent transaction might be very useful for paying for a few AI tokens or whatever it is. And on the other hand I can settle a billion dollar transaction which is I just bought whatever gazillion barrels of oil and I'm settling that transaction in a safe way on the Internet. So very scalable models. So I'm a big believer in this convergence between AI, AI agents.
- [27:39]
A
I mean this is the missing financial layer that the Internet never had. It was about data and images and video, but it was missing the whole financial layer. We sort of like patched together this maybe trustable credit card capabilities that, you know, is my credit card safe? But.
- [27:57]
B
Right.
- [27:57]
A
This is, I mean, I don't know, it feels like we're about to see a hyper, you know, hyper exponential growth across the board. Imad, you were going to ask a second part of your question, I think.
- [28:09]
C
No, I was just kind of thinking you actually kind of launched Circle before Ethereum and this all came together even.
- [28:16]
B
Yeah.
- [28:16]
C
And then now it's kind of moved on and it feels like we're going beyond smart contracts because money will actually get intelligent. Smart contracts can be a bit dumb sometimes.
- [28:26]
B
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, I mean there's sort of off chain and on chain. Right. Like what's off chain? Compute, which arguably will be a lot of AI. You still need proving grounds, right? You need these proving grounds for the off chain compute. And that's where I think the blockchain networks as kind of economic coordination layers can be very, very powerful. And that's certainly how we think about it. But when we founded the company, the concept of Internet of Things and AI and blockchains, that was talked about, but there we were, AI was, was, you know, nowhere. I mean it was, it was moving along, you know, just like blockchain's been moving along and like. And people are like, yeah, isn't that just respectively IBM, Watson in jeopardy back then, shitcoins or whatever? Yeah, no, yeah, we had that, we had that. Yeah. So you had, you had these things and I'm a big believer and I, I know you are too, Peter, of when, you know, kind of when you have multiple exponential technologies that compound each.
- [29:33]
A
Other converging, that's where.
- [29:34]
B
Yeah, the converge, Convergent. I think that's one of the most important things that a tech entrepreneur can do is.
- [29:41]
A
And new business models that come out of that.
- [29:43]
B
Yes, right. 100%.
- [29:45]
A
So Jeremy, I've heard you talk about two scenarios which show how absolutely inane and antiquated our financial system is. And I would love you to just do it in brief for everybody, all of our listeners who really get this. When you look at how a brokerage, how you invest in stocks through a brokerage, compare that today to what it could be and then how banks actually work. When you deposit say a million dollars into a bank, what happens? Can you cover those two? And talk about like, you know, when you stop and realize like really that's the way it works. That's insane.
- [30:21]
B
I think that a lot of people don't understand, I mean they do viscerally because they get nervous when they give their money to anyone. But like, you know, we've heard about bank runs. Like what is a bank run? Well, a bank run is because the business model of a bank is to take a dollar to borrow a dollar from you. They're borrowing a dollar from you and then they're permitted to lend it out 12 times.
- [30:46]
A
That's insane.
- [30:47]
B
That's what fractional reserve banking is. And I have been a adherent since the founding of this company and I continue to be an adherent today. The idea that you can have a separation of money and credit and that you can have full reserve money where if I give you a dollar I'm not allowed to do anything with it, it's a dollar and I can build a super hyper efficient payment system on that extremely low risk form of money. And then if you want to borrow money, it's got to be borrowing on that full reserve money.
- [31:23]
D
So can I drill in on that just for a second? This I think is one of the most admirable aspects of Circle where each dollar is fully collateral reserved, right? Yeah, that's not the case with say tether or some of the other coins. What made you had you make that choice? Because that's a very principal choice that costs a lot. So something had you made that kind of principle and go, we're sticking by that. I'd love to hear the history of that.
- [31:53]
B
Yeah, I mean there's a short easy answer and then there's a slightly longer fuller answer that expresses the real thing. The short easy answer is we're required to by law. So when we built USDC we're regulated under what are called money transmission statutes. And money transmission statutes are federal law which guide how electronic money transmission works. And then each state in the United States has a license that you get for being what is called a money service. Business. It's essentially a bank that takes money and moves money, but can't lend money. So it is a narrow focus. And so in the historical realm that was Western Union and then that later became PayPal and Apple Pay and all these things. And lots of the fintechs are actually money transmitters. So we were, we were regulated under money transmission law. And let's say we go to the state of. I don't know, where do you live.
- [32:53]
A
Celine, New York, New Jersey or whatever.
- [32:56]
B
You're in a place, okay, you're in a place, you're in a state. The state has a banking regulator and the banking regular. We had to go state by state and say, okay, we'd like a license to operate in your state. And they say, okay, here it is, you got to post some bonds that are like collateral and then you have to basically back your electronic money instrument with a permissible set of investments that are called the permissible investment clauses, which are these super narrow, they're designed to be hyper liquid assets. And so that is to have that instrument be as safe as possible. So that's the legal, short legal answer. But the other is more philosophical which relates to the discussion we were just having. And one of the motivations for starting CIRCLE was I got very interested in the nature of money, the nature of banking and the nature of the monetary system after the great financial crisis. And I studied it and stuff I already knew if you had ever watched It's a Wonderful Life and wow, these bank runs. But the GFC was a totally different scale. It was all this opacity at all these levered up instruments, manipulation, what the fuck? And I looked at that and there were ideas bouncing around as there have been from time to time for okay, is there a way to have full reserve payment system money separated from lending money? And that idea came up again after the great financial crisis and it stuck with me. And it sort of really occurred to me that what I kind of consider a more sound money basis for the banking system makes a lot of sense. And I thought when I started CIRCLE with Sean, it was like, well actually we could construct that on the Internet, actually. And in fact it's totally necessary on the Internet. You don't want these IOUs floating around free floating, moving around on the Internet, that's like a recipe for total disaster. And so it was almost like, okay, well we have to design this this way. And so as we move from the early regulations like the money transmission laws into stablecoin laws that sort of deal with this at a deeper Level as a, this is a defined form of money in the financial system level like that, that kind of reserve model became paramount and it went from an operating reality for us into kind of federal law as well.
- [35:22]
D
You know, I made a list of all the people you must have threatened along the way. Right. Which were competing stablecoin folks, the big tech and financial payment systems like Pay Cal, the banks and especially some of the smaller banks, the regulators and monetary authorities, the Fed, the payment intermediaries like Visa and others firms giving credit and lending incumbents in the fiat banking system. I mean you had to navigate all of that.
- [35:50]
B
I'm still navigating it.
- [35:53]
D
Doesn't the Federal Reserve kind of go, wait a minute, he's acting, acting like a central bank shut them down. Don't you get that response? And how have you navigated that?
- [36:02]
B
So a couple things on that. I've had a chance to spend a lot of time with the leaders of many of the biggest central banks in the world just in the past couple of weeks and I share the stage with the head of the World bank of the imf. Now they're not central bankers, but they look over like big, big, big things. I think one thing that's really important is that a stablecoin, a regulated stablecoin inherits the monetary policy of the central bank. It does not replace it. We do not set interest rates on money. We do not establish the price of money, nor do we create money. A central bank can create money. As I like to say, they have the SQL insert statement capability in their database.
- [36:53]
A
You can do it once.
- [36:54]
C
Once.
- [36:55]
A
You can do it once.
- [36:56]
B
Well, yes, but not even once. I can copy once basically. Right. And so we do not create money, nor do we set the price of money. And so nor do we replace the central bank's core settlement ledger for, at an absolute level for that fiat currency. So we kind of augment that with an Internet infrastructure that makes that particular currency super useful, more useful than I think it, it has been before. And we inherit from the monetary policy. So if the price of money is increasing or the price of money is decreasing, the behavior of markets adjusts accordingly. But we don't have any role in that. We are, we are what I call a kind of macro cyclical, macro sensitive business like banks in that sense. But we don't actually, we're not involved. I don't go to the rate setting meetings.
- [38:03]
C
So I think probably some listeners are wondering why do the central banks issue their own digital currencies? And the Trump administration said that's a bad idea. Why? And the other part is what happens with the genius act when JP Morgan and others say, hey, we can do a stable coin too. How do you see all that playing out?
- [38:21]
B
Yeah, it's a great question. So you probably Remember back in 2018, 2019, there was a proposal for something which were colloquially referred to as zuck bucks that came out. What's interesting is that we launched USDC in 2018. We published our white paper in 2017, and then that was kind of conceptually introduced in 2019. And, you know, we were like a little, little guy, right. And there was 500 million USDC in circulation. But, like, Facebook was like, oh, my God, they have 3 billion users. Like, all the governments in the world were like, freaking out and, you know, for good reason. Yeah, right. And I think the other challenge was like, Zuckbucks were actually like synthetic money that were going to be based on a whole bunch of currencies. And they thought like, oh, the world's ready for that. And it turned out a lot of governments were very uncomfortable with that idea. So that was like a wake up call. And the result of that wake up call was that certain governments, notably, first the Chinese, said, we cannot allow private money to come and sweep over the world. So we're going to respond by building a central bank digital currency. And research into central bank digital currencies skyrocketed. The Atlantic Council, I think, talked about there are 122 governments researching Central bank digital currencies. But China actually had begun work on this, and I met the founders of it back in 2014. I met them in Beijing. And then that project, which was sort of a laboratory project, was like, okay, we got to ship. And when the Chinese decide to ship, they ship. And so that launched what is now known as ecny. And it's really interesting lesson because the Chinese government's a very powerful government. I think we all think about the Chinese government as a centrally run government that can just tell people what to do and they'll do it. In fact, it's not the case. It's not the case. And that product got launched in 2020. It got launched over two years ago. And no one uses it. No one wants to use it. And it's interesting. No one wants to use it. They made every payment app, every bank, Everyone had to have ecny. Why? Why didn't people use it? It's because, in my view, people want the most innovative product. People want to use the thing that has the most utility for them. And guess what, Alipay and WeChat Pay just have more utility. It's like, this is like. And it's private sector innovation. I can walk into a store and I can go up to the counter and they can say, do you want to buy this? And yeah, I want to buy this. And it voice authenticates me and I walk out. And that's like a feature of Alipay and WeChat. Okay, is that a feature that the central government's going to build? Private sector innovation, technology and software innovation is like all. You know, you may have government funding, et cetera, but it's like fundamentally entrepreneurship. That's why, you know, we're sitting here on moonshots, right? Entrepreneurship is so key. And I think even in a place where the government can say, you have to have this, you have to support this, people didn't want to use it. And so what's actually happened is this has become somewhat of a spiritual, philosophical, maybe not spiritual, philosophical debate. And it is a debate between the government being in your pocketbook directly and having direct access to your money and your behavior and the choices you make directly. Like, I'm like piped right into the government's database or is there an air gap between me and the government? And today, 97% or so of the financial transactions we have are intermediated by private third party intermediaries. That is the way it works today. And if you go back over say even 75 years in the west, in the liberal market order, like every major technology innovation and money has come from the private sector. You know, that was like checks and check clearing and ATMs and credit cards and debit cards and then like PayPal and then Apple Pay and then stablecoins. And like all this innovation comes from many times consortiums of actors getting together and saying, hey, we're going to build this new technical utility and we're going to agree on it and people are going to use it. And so I think in the United States there's hostility, there's just outright hostility to this concept that the government's going to build all this for us. And so I think the Trump administration essentially banned it. So there's nothing going on here. In Europe, the central bank is pushing forward with a digital euro project, but the banks are very resistant to it. The actual commercial banks are very resistant to it because they're like, hey, you're going to disintermediate me. But at the same time, the Europeans have passed stablecoin laws and now the banks and others and Circle are doing Euro stablecoins. The estimated launch date for a CBDC in Europe is 2029. And I don't know if they're going to have again if that's going to slip or what. But if you're saying it's 2029.
- [44:15]
A
Defeating itself, well.
- [44:19]
B
I mean, so I think that this sort of like, hey, we're going to take a bet on open source, open Internet software, innovation, entrepreneurship, competitive markets and a fair playing field. I think it's a winning bet. So I think the US is the winning bet right now. But it does come to the other part of your question, Ahmad, which is like, hey, aren't these. Okay, okay, well JP Morgan, other guys are going to come in and I think a couple things. I think one is that for a commercial bank, the sort of creating a new under the Genius Act, a commercial bank is actually banned from issuing a stablecoin. Why is that? Because you wouldn't want a stablecoin backed by risky deposits and risky loans. And so but a bank holding company, a company that owns a bank can also create a stablecoin subsidiary and issue a stablecoin. And then the guys running that are going to say, okay, I have this money I can get over here or I can lend it out 12 times and I capture more margin or I have this thing I can't do anything with. And its ultimate promise is commoditization of payments into where the payments are priced at zero.
- [45:32]
D
That is not worth the thing.
- [45:34]
C
Right.
- [45:34]
B
So there's sort of a structural thing there. But it still may be that banks actually want the payment system utility benefits. They want the programmability of money. They want to offer their corporate and institutional clients this innovation. And we actually see huge opportunities to partner with banks and we are, you'll see more and more of that. But we're partnering with banks where they're like, well, we can just kind of convert in and out of the stablecoin for its utility on the Internet, but then preserve our deposits and lending. And so you're seeing some hybridization happen. But I think nonetheless though, imad, there's going to be a lot more competition. There's going to be a lot more competition in this space. And I think my best reference is that stablecoins are Internet platform utilities and networks and they have developer driven flywheels and network effects and they have liquidity driven flywheels and network effects and those are significant competitive moats. We have those moats, but we're not sitting still because there's so many people who see this is A huge multitrillion dollar opportunity.
- [46:39]
A
So Jeremy, this has been an incredible moonshot that you've effectively achieved your first goals of a decade ago. Looking 10 years out and speaking to the entrepreneurs who are, you know, our subscribers on moonshots, what should they be thinking about? Where are the massive untapped opportunities that you're excited about seeing?
- [47:02]
B
Yeah, it touches on something we were talking about earlier, which is. Well, first of all, I think we're in the super early stages in all this. This is super early stage and I like to think about it as through a couple of lenses, the, like the total addressable market of the global financial system is like, you know, I don't know what it is. It's like hundreds of trillions of dollars. It's like this enormous thing and like the revenue streams of all the intermediaries is $10 trillion. It's like this huge thing. Right. I think just like earlier epochs of the Internet where kind of open Internet infrastructure and open software kind of collided with industries, restructured the product utility, restructured the unit economics, built a better way to approach it and unlocked completely new things that weren't possible before. Those kinds of things happen over 10 or 20 years. They take longer than people think. We might be in an acceleration environment because of AI that may come in, but it's, we still, they still take these long arcs. But even after these long ARCs, even after 10 or 20 years, the platform businesses that get built are trillion dollar companies, but they still represent a small percentage of the equivalent of the, of the prior regime. Right. The viewing hours of broadcast, terrestrial cable, satellite are still far in excess of people who watch streaming. Even though we're like, well you were.
- [48:41]
A
You were in, you were in the digital media world, right? And there's so many great analogies between old media and today's media world and stablecoins. Yeah please.
- [48:52]
B
I use, I like to, I like to say over the top Internet money. It's like over the top, you know. Video this episode is brought to you.
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A
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Today.
- [50:03]
A
You were going down. You know, you and I have talked about the idea of a, the future of the corporation, which I think is very cool for entrepreneurs to be thinking about. And we'll be talking more about that in the, in the weeks ahead. But do you mind sort of giving a vision statement there?
- [50:19]
B
Yeah, yeah. So I was, I was, I wanted to share that, which is my first point is it's early days. And so I think for entrepreneurs and people who are thinking about what can they do with this technology, it's super early. I think the second is that we're at the front end of a new operating system paradigm. We go through these platform shifts every so often. The web was a platform shift away from personal computers, it was a platform shift in terms of information. We've had platform shifts in terms of communications, utilities and social media, social messaging. We've had platform shifts in terms of going from desktop to mobile, from data centers to cloud, blah, blah, blah. So we have these platform shifts. And I think there's two operating system kind of platform shifts happening right now. One is AI foundation models, which are effectively new operating systems. And I think they are compute engines, you write apps and they execute tasks. And they're far more capable operating systems than we've ever had before. So that's one incredible platform shift. And the other are these economic operating systems which are purpose built blockchain networks. And these economic operating systems are another platform shift. And I think with that, just like with other platforms, you get a new set of material to work with. Like with the iPhone, you had the GPS and you had the touchscreen and you had, you know, the camera, right. So you had new facilities to work with. And so you're getting these new facilities to work with these economic operating systems, these blockchain networks. You're getting the ability to have like provable executable contracts that can be deployed and intermediated on the Internet. You're getting the ability to have kind of provable tamper resistant data structures that can be interacted with. And so it creates a substrate where you for example, could take conceptually what is a corporation and you could actually implement that entirely in software as a mixture of humans and agents. And so you could form the capital by selling tokens. The Token capital can be stored in a treasury that's on chain. And that treasury could be mostly stablecoins. You can automate all of the monetary flows on that. You can have the governance, which is like stakeholder participation, who decides what to do with the treasury, who decides what contracts to enter into. Or manifest can be the governance layer with provable voting entirely done on chain. The entire audit of the books and records and everything that happens is real time, auditable. You can use view keys and other things to kind of create selective disclosure models. And so you can create, you know, on chain governance, on chain decision making, you can have that entity delegate work to AI, you can have it delegate work to humans. You can have the actual contract between the AI and the entity manifesting code. You can have the contract between the humans manifesting code, and you can build all that that's available. Salim, can you do this?
- [53:35]
A
It's coming. Saleem, we've been talking about the promise.
- [53:37]
D
Of DAOs without the governance issues.
- [53:40]
B
Well, yeah. So, I mean, daos, I think, are fascinating because they're an experimental thing, but I think I've studied sort of 400 years of the development of, say, the joint stock corporation that then became modern capital markets, that then became modern banking, and the emergence of corporations as organizing entities. And then all of this is tied up in. I think about this a lot. It's tied up in theories of capital and capital. And the Industrial Revolution was all about capital and labor, and it was Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, and what is the ultimate relationship of labor to capital. But now that's being disrupted because capital can have a relationship to machines and machine labor and not human labor. And this is deeper philosophical questions for society. But those are real things. And what in this world that we're moving into, like, I think it's the first time since the kind of corporations, joint stock corporations, the governance models that we have, where we can revisit all of that. We can actually revisit all of that.
- [54:52]
A
Jeremy, you're describing the first fully on chain corporation, right? Where contracts, payments, treasury, governance agents, even robots are on the blockchain developing products and services and deliver them 100%. Yes.
- [55:08]
B
And we do need laws. We need laws.
- [55:11]
A
And the velocity.
- [55:11]
B
We actually have to have enforcement. Like, that's the other thing. We still need prisons for the humans that do bad things. We still need. We still have people who do not meet their commercial obligations. And you need to be able to sue them and go after their assets. Like, there are certain things we absolutely need. So, like, there's no AI court, which is probably a good thing right now. But the velocity, trust the velocity of.
- [55:39]
A
Those companies is going to be, is so explosive that I'm not sure any corporation can compete. So is there a hard takeoff in the future of corporations in that capacity?
- [55:52]
B
Yeah, so that's, that's what I think. I think, I don't know what the timeframe is, but I think given exponential improvements in AI and given this technology substrate, I think we will. And we already have like the single founder company phenomenon, right. Which is sort of an AI driven phenomenon. Right. And actually you have on chain, kind of on chain organizations. I mean the best recent example is something called hyperliquid. And hyperliquid is a software protocol. Okay. It is a set of smart contracts that exist on the public Internet. Okay? It's open source, it's a protocol, it has a token and there's stakeholder economics for the people who created it, the people who govern and make choices and make improvement decisions on the protocol itself. And then the protocol itself generates fee revenue from the use of the protocol. Now it's a specific protocol that is focused on futures, like structuring futures markets.
- [56:52]
D
So perpetual Dex, if I remember right.
- [56:55]
B
Yes, it's a perpetual derivatives exchange protocol, but it's actually now like an underlying infrastructure where you can instantiate it for other things. You could create a perpetual for sports betting, you could create a perpetual for anything that you want a perpetual future on. You could have a perpetual futures market on AI, compute, whatever you can imagine. So they've created this thing where you can instantiate on it. And that instantiation derives revenue. Now that entire protocol and that entire infrastructure has been built, delivered and operated by 10 people. 11 people. 11 people. It's doing well over a billion dollars of revenue right now. It's a billion dollars of revenue. Now that revenue is actually being returned to the token holders and the stakeholders, which is getting more people to pile in and build on it. So it's creating compounding network effects for the protocol itself. And I think that these kinds of digital token based incentive systems combined with AI work, AI workers and human workers, and these kind of new systems of governance that are possible on these networks that are highly globalized will create kind of super predator corporations, if you will, that are a hybrid of humans and AIs. And we'll make things, they'll make physical things and they'll make services. And I think that they'll drive the.
- [58:27]
A
Bankruptcy lawyers business forward.
- [58:29]
B
I mean it's definitely going to keep.
- [58:30]
D
The lawyers which will also be AIs, by the way.
- [58:35]
A
So now I just want to hear IMOD's views on these things. But go ahead, Salim. But we'll go to imod.
- [58:39]
D
No, no, go ahead. Let's hear from Iman. I've got a thought.
- [58:42]
C
I don't know, I just think it's going to be fantastic. The US hasn't recovered in monetary velocity since COVID right? Yeah. Basically what you're describing, and I think this is why you're building ARC Euro and L1 and things like that as well. Money's about to go from static to supercharged.
- [59:00]
B
Yes.
- [59:01]
C
And the thing that I'm most fascinated about, I've been working on new economic theory and things like that. You've talked to lots of central bankers. Are they even ready for that pickup in monetary velocity? Because that impacts inflation if you don't have output impact.
- [59:14]
D
That's a rhetorical question, by the way, from you.
- [59:18]
C
Are they even aware about what's coming?
- [59:21]
B
I'm telling them, I'm telling them. And I think the really smart people, and I'm not going to name names, the really smart people are like, oh my fucking God. I mean, so you're exactly right, Imad. I think you're exactly right. Like monetary theory, like money velocity and monetary theory are going to get upended. And I think one of the risks of course, is that people throw up the gates. Right. And say no, that's right. And I think the fact that currently, right now, the United States is not throwing up the gates. The United States is saying, no, we're going to let this grow. Similar situation with AI. People can throw up the gates, you can throw up the gates, or you can have prudent regulation and what I call agile policymaking, which is an oxymoron, but agile policymaking, because there are going to be these things that are profound. And I think the concern, of course, for people who've studied recent financial crises is it was the liberalization of derivatives regimes that arguably allowed for these toxic balance sheets to develop that then led to the blowups behind the great financial crisis. So there's an argument to be made and that also had to do with just inherent opacity in the system. And so one of my first principles is that and blockchains are really good at this is radical transparency and cryptographic proving are like again part of the new toolbox. What's different, you have this new material to work with, cryptographic proofs and that allows for real time auditability. It allows for a lot of things that weren't possible. And so I think probably like in other areas, governments are going to need technology people to be writing software to deal with some of this stuff as well.
- [61:29]
D
One of my community members, Jerry Mikulski, is famous for saying abundance equals scarcity minus trust. And something you've done profoundly well is create structures for scaling trust. And this is going to help us get to where we want to go. Really, really powerful. Just to comment back to the core future of the corporation. When I'm advising CEOs and Peter and I are both doing a lot of this right now, what we're saying is basically create a digital twin with everything being AI native and digital native with smart contracts running most of your operations and put the entire company on chain driven by AI. And essentially that's going to replace the mothership with all these people at headquarters, bean counters and policymakers and product strategy people. And if you're not doing that, somebody else is doing that to you and you have a choice. And it's a really simple discussion.
- [62:22]
B
I think that's right. I think that's right. And I would say 100%. And you know, now I'm like a New York Stock Exchange listed public company. And so like, like I have a lot, I have a lot of embedded infrastructure obligations that are there for a good reason. And so I'm not that agile startup. I can't just like, poof, I'm on chain. So I think the road for larger companies that have these larger systems of regulation on them, it's a different road. But I think that the basic advice I agree with and I think there are still open legal questions on a lot of stuff and the tooling is not quite there yet on some of this stuff, like to do everything like put all your operations in smart contracts, like it's still, it's still like it's still hard. But if I look at kind of the progression of things, it's going to become easier and easier and easier in the coming years. And now that people are starting to conceptualize this, like there's going to be people really going after it and there's a tools market to develop here as well.
- [63:40]
A
Huge E mine.
- [63:41]
C
Yeah, I think so. I saw kind of you're launching your own L1 arc and there were two really interesting things kind of picking up on Salim's thing about transparency and trust. One is that on the one hand it's going to be super fast, like sub second finality. On the other side there's refundability. Like I just got some stable coins today. And I was like, where are they? And they're like, oh, we sent USDT instead of usdc. And I was like USDC all the time, obviously. So I just kind of wondered, how is that balance there? Like, how did you come up with the requirement for finality, but then the ability to reverse transactions as well? What was the behind that?
- [64:17]
B
So actually there's a little bit of misreporting that you've probably picked up on, which is that so fundamental is sort of deterministic settlement finality as fast as possible, as cheap as possible. Right. So that's like a fundamental thing and that is core. And that's important not just for moving a dollar. That's important to like the, who, who owns the house or who owns the stock or did, did the contract complete its, its execution? Right. All, all these things sort of provable final state is like essential. And so that's there. Now what you, you have to think about is like, okay, now, now I have other things. Like I have a, I have an issued, I have an issued asset that's a protocol usdc and that's there. And I know that Circle is a regulated centralized issuer, but it sort of works on the public Internet. But Circle, because it's a regulated centralized issuer, you know, has to follow sanctions law. So if, if, if an entity is sanctioned, like, we actually have to freeze that, that account. And we do that on like 28 blockchains. Not just Spark, but on 28 blockchains. That is a hard law requirement. Okay? And so that's there, but then you sort of say, okay, well, I want to start using this in retail transactions. Like I want to buy a cup of coffee with this, or more realistically, I want to buy a product on the Internet that someone's going to send to me. And there all of a sudden there's other things you need, like you need metadata, you need other data alongside the cache. That data could be the invoice or the receipt. That data could be other relevant metadata. So, for example, we are adding a native protocol called recibo is what we call it. But it's essentially like an ISO data messaging protocol that is useful, it's like a useful thing for metadata alongside the actual bearer asset, the monetary asset. And then what we've also done is we've created, and this is just in R and D right now, we haven't published it, we've created something called the refund protocol. And so the idea is not that the blockchain itself is reversible. No, the blockchain is not reversible. It's not that USDC is reversible. No USDC transactions are final unless they're sanctioned. Okay, so that's just a thing. And then above that you create, essentially you can create a payment protocol that supports a refund. And that's experimental right now. But the concept is that if I do buy the product and it was fraudulent or I do buy the product and I don't like it, it was the wrong product, it was this shitty thing I bought and it's broken. It came with the, whatever it was. You need the ability to have a way to return value on the basis of whether it's fraud or just a customer choice. And so refund protocols is just a proposed protocol. It's not actually built into the blockchain. It's a higher level protocol. And we've proposed an insurance pool model so that people can stand in the transactions and basically effectively buy the insurance and sell the risk. And so you effectively have a market for the risk of refunds that anyone could participate in. And so you create a global decentralized market for risk of refunds.
- [67:46]
A
Makes sense.
- [67:46]
B
And so that's actually what we are proposing. We are not proposing a blockchain that reverses transactions. We are not proposing that USDC reverses transactions. We're working on these higher level things that are I think important at an application layer for ultimate commerce. Right.
- [68:02]
A
Jeremy, take it home for me. One second. When am I buying things on Amazon or Starbucks with usdc? Where is it right now? What is the average user listening today using USDC for? And what will they a year from now?
- [68:16]
B
Yeah, so it's interesting, USDC is widely used around the world and it's used by people and businesses in hundreds of countries. And obviously it got its start as a digital cash for investing and trading and as working capital with the digital asset markets. That was what I called the bootstrap utility. 24. 7, 365 markets need 24. 7, 365 money. And naturally that emerged. That morphed into innovators that are building on chain protocols for financial products. So borrowing and lending protocols, things like these derivatives protocols. And so USDC has become capital in borrowing and lending. But what's really happened in particular over the last couple of years is we've seen this really strong growth in its use in cross border transactions, international transactions. And there are so many companies now that build products in payroll and payouts and B2B payments and others, adding in the stablecoin rail because it's just a more efficient medium to settle transactions into markets around the world. And that relates to another major use case, which is as a store of value. So this gets back to your dollar question, which is actually people want dollars. People want to hold dollars. And in huge parts of the enormous parts of the world, they'd rather hold a digital dollar that has Internet utility than hold a local bank dollar or a local bank currency. And so there's sort of this is over the top again. Like it's when people figured out, oh, I can use WhatsApp instead of paying SMS fees with my local carrier. And so there's sort of this overtop phenomenon and that's proliferating. And so you're getting users and that's cascading into small businesses who are figuring it out because they don't have big compliance departments. And so you're sort of seeing this happen around the world. And so by virtue of that, that is not. You're walking into Starbucks. There's plenty of what I call USDC debit cards. So Visa and MasterCard have wired up to USDC. So if I'm an issuer and my card is actually the money I have is usdc, you can actually use that USDC to pay at a merchant, just. But it's the same payment. Rails, it's the Visa Rail, it's the Apple pay. But the actual settlement between the person who gave you that card and Visa is done using usdc, which is kind of cool. But I think my view is that the kind of retail commerce, I mean, you've got Shopify just rolled out USDC for all their sellers and it's like, it's just there, it just shows up and they're incentivizing merchants with like, they'll pay the merchant 50 basis points to accept a payment in USDC. So that's coming online this quarter. I don't know what that's going to do. Stripe has rolled out USDC as a payment method that's available out of the box to any merchant. But the usage in E commerce is still very, very small. And I think that we still have. There's still work to do on the user experience, there's still work to do getting more and more what I'll just call like mainstream wallets, to have this integrated in a simple, seamless way. And we need things like the refund protocol, we need other pieces there so that like some of the user expectations can be met. And that's why I think it's still a couple of Years away from kind of widespread use.
- [71:40]
A
You haven't had your pizza day yet. Equivalent.
- [71:43]
B
I mean there's lots of transactions happening that are, that are, that are. There are lots of retail transactions happening. There's lots of every kind of transaction happening. People buying digital goods.
- [71:53]
D
Sure.
- [71:53]
B
People buying, you know, other other things. And, and actually there's a lot of huge transactions happening to the biggest electronic trading firms in the world. Use USDC to settle multi hundred million dollar transactions with some frequency. And so it has all that. But I think there's areas from a UX and ultimate distribution perspective that there's still work that's really.
- [72:16]
A
So let's move it up from the consumer to the CFO. We have a lot of corporate CFO CEOs who are on this podcast. Five years from now you're running a multinational organization. Is is USDC sort of the Internet rails of all your transactions to all of your stores around the world?
- [72:37]
B
Yeah, I mean we, we, we believe that sort of on chain treasury management is going to become a huge thing. There are also again lots of companies, lots of startups, lots of fintechs that are already in this space that are baking USDC into what they do. It's actually a fast growing startup area and established companies like Brex just launched USDC as a feature for people. You're seeing spin outs from the big ERP systems like SAP building on chain treasury solutions. So I think yes, the ability to move money from a tokenized money market into stablecoin cash to settle transactions programmatically instantly anywhere in the world across geographies is very powerful. And it's sort of time value of money, capital efficiency, auditability, there's a lot of really, really powerful things there. And I think the regulatory clarity that's coming online has sort of been one of the missing pieces until you have USDC is treated as a cash or cash equivalent instrument on a balance sheet that an auditor can say what it is and, and you have the regulatory backing that this is actually legal electronic money from a payment system perspective. And you have the tooling and the enterprise infrastructure that's all kind of coming online right now. And so if I look a year out and then two years out and certainly five years out, that curve, I think on that kind of what's happening with on chain treasury is one of the most exciting areas of this space.
- [74:20]
A
Salim, what are you thinking?
- [74:23]
D
How do you compare with Tether? What are the big differences?
- [74:28]
B
You know, I mean I think Tether has actually built an extraordinary business and obviously they're larger than us. So they're a good bit larger than us. And I think they really had a lot of their core strengths come from the critical role that they played in offshore crypto markets. I mean, it was actually kind of birthed out of one of the offshore Asian exchanges, Bitfinex, and then obviously other big Asian exchanges adopted it because they didn't have dollar banking and a lot of them were Chinese firms. And so they needed to create a way to have a kind of form of dollar banking. So they got bootstrapped in that and they're still very strong there. And so USDC has grown a lot in these digital asset markets on a percentage basis in terms of what's happening in those markets. But they're still super, super strong there. And so their growth is strongly supported inside of that space. I would say we've also, I think philosophically our outlook, I don't know if it's different entirely, but we've always been rooted in this idea that we're building a new Internet financial system. We need to do this in the regulated realm. We need to enshrine this in law. We need to work with policies first. We've been US first and we've been kind of regulatory first and we've built a very strong compliance apparatus and that's allowed us to work with some of the biggest banks in the world, some of the biggest asset managers in the world, some of the work with the biggest governments in the world. So those are things that we've done. And I think our view is that when we talked about that TAM earlier, this multi hundred trillion dollar TAM that's out there, and then the TAM just in the revenue streams of what runs through all that, that's still on the come. Trillion here, trillion there. No one's really kind of gone into that. And so I'm comfortable and confident that continuing to do what we do the way we do it is going to lead to continued growth. That's what I obviously believe. And I think that this is a market that will support many significant platforms as well.
- [76:50]
D
You've definitely taken the road less traveled on that one. I'm going to guess that the Genius act is generally a great tailwind for you, am I right?
- [76:58]
A
My question is, what did you do to celebrate when the Genius act got passed?
- [77:02]
B
You know, it's pretty amazing really. I did, you know, I had been, you know, sort of working on getting a federal law for stablecoins for like four plus years, five years, explicitly where there was actually a bill being discussed. And then you know, conceptually for much longer. And yeah, it was a pretty extraordinary moment. I think I. Yeah, my kids were in summer camp and so my wife and I think we, I don't know what we did. We had a good, we had, we had, we had fun. I was in dc, I went to the signing ceremony and that was pretty powerful. But I think it is, yeah, to the question, yeah, it is a tailwind because I think it starts to build that certainty around what is this form of money? How is it treated? How can. If I'm a mainstream corporation or I'm another financial institution, I now have the confidence that I can start to use this and build on this. And that's huge. And it also is recognized around the world. I mean, right now my team are the explainers in chief of Genius act to governments all around the world who are like, okay, what is this? What does this mean? And sort of, should we be doing this? And then also like, if you're a Genius act compliant stablecoin, how do we treat you in our financial system? Just like they all support dollars in their financial system, how do they treat this in their financial system? And so it's really causing that. And those are good backdrops. But as Imad noted earlier, right. It's invited so much more interest, so much more competition. I wouldn't be surprised to see a new stablecoin every week that's introduced, purportedly Genius act compliant, even though Genius act is not yet statutory, in effect for a while.
- [79:07]
D
But I'm going to create a competitor to you called Square.
- [79:11]
C
Being taken. Celine already.
- [79:14]
A
Did you hear?
- [79:16]
B
Circle and Square merged and formed Hexagon. That was an April Fool's joke. One day, actually.
- [79:23]
A
Okay, so Imod and Jeremy, a question for you. It's ten years from now. We've got digital superintelligence way beyond our current conception. And there's a trillion agents running around. And these agents have buying authority. They have access to stablecoins. I mean, is that a viable option a decade from now? How is that going to be even conceivable in today's regulatory structures? And what kind of a hyper hyper exponential is that going to cause us? And how exciting is that future? Imad, you first.
- [80:04]
C
Look, I think that's a super exciting future. I think with stablecoins and the work you've done at Circle, it's always like, why would you want dumb money if you can have smart money, right? And obviously the agents will want smart money and they will direct it to where is most economically valuable. So the goal of regulation shouldn't be to stifle innovation. Like earlier, Jeremy was talking about the Chinese and the DCEP that turned into ecny. I was a hedge fund manager back then and Tencent and Alibaba had Alipay and WeChat Pay. They enforced reserve regulations on them because the money was going around. This was before the digital one and they basically said you have to give us all the interest. So there's a trillion yuan there where unlike generally putting it into really high quality UST bills and things like that, they just lost billions of dollars a year because of regulation. And then a lot of the Chinese payment regulation slowed down. So if I look forward 10 years, what's happening is they're finding the most economically valuable things and again we need to define the value to end users. They're using smart and then intelligent money on optimized rails to move that around. And then you have a self balancing, self driving economy. If we get it right, if we get the regulations wrong and there's going to be this competition to adopt it because money will flow where money is liquid. So if Europe doesn't adopt this and other countries don't, it will come to the US which has the regulation, then I think that's a world of abundance because we'll finally be allocating stuff where it matters as opposed to now. Most of the money just sits there dumb.
- [81:40]
B
I like that perspective Imad. I definitely share that view. I think there is such a thing as a control function in corporations. I think the interesting question is and regulators, mostly what they do is check that you have a control function that's functioning. Actually like that's actually they're like show me your policy on this, show me your policy on that. And they'll get a third party auditor to come in and perform a SOC 2 audit to make sure that what you said you do, you actually do. And so controls are really important. And so I think one of the things that we need to work towards is how do we have provable controls in an AI intermediated system, both human in the loop and agentic provable controls, auditable controls, and get policy and regulation to deal with these kind of proving grounds again for control mechanisms. And we actually just launched an open source project called SecureTool, which actually is a wrapper on OpenAI SDKs for agents that specifically enables the ability to insert control functions into monetary transactions that agents would conduct specifically to deal with this issue of wait a minute, I'm not just going to delegate that. The agent can just party on with this wallet, I'm going to want the API to have a permissioning structure for the AI itself. Now that's just one example that we've crafted. And I think that's again, entire tool chains can get built up in this area. And again, I think it's probably the innovators, the builders, the tool developers, the software creators that are going to figure this out by necessity before the regulatory bodies. But I do think to achieve that hypervelocity, which I do think is an incredible world of output and capability building and wealth creation and prosperity, like we have to kind of figure out what are the control functions. And that's obviously an issue with unbounded AI as well.
- [83:56]
D
Right?
- [83:57]
B
Control functions, societal control functions, et cetera. So it's not unique to financial. It relates to like interaction with critical systems and all that kind of stuff too.
- [84:05]
A
If we get it right, the future is going to be amazing.
- [84:09]
D
I remember Jeff Booth saying once that what he reasonably was excited about Bitcoin was that it gives you money velocity without debt. And I think what you've achieved with USDC is the same thing. You have money velocity without the extreme debt, which is.
- [84:24]
B
It's a first principle.
- [84:25]
C
Yep.
- [84:26]
A
Well, Jeremy, I know that your, your 10 year vision, your founding vision, if I have it correctly, is raise global prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value, build safer and more inclusive financial systems on sort of an Internet financial system. And you've done that. I'd love to close with what's your vision a decade from now is giving you founding mission a decade from now?
- [84:52]
B
Well, I actually feel like we're still at the front end of realizing that mission and I think I talked to my team about this and I just had a leadership gathering and talked to my team about this and sort of looked out a little bit and described some of the things that we talked about here, which it's really rewarding to talk about here as well, which is what are the nature of corporate forms, what is the impact of this society?
- [85:26]
A
Can I share our secret that we're maybe talking about an XPRIZE on this topic?
- [85:31]
B
It's an interesting idea, that's for sure. It's definitely an interesting idea. Look, so I think we're early and I ultimately I want to see like, I mean you could argue like data center and GPU and energy spend has contributed all the GDP growth in the US this year. So arguably at least GDP output has increased because of AI this year.
- [86:01]
A
Okay, yes, for sure.
- [86:03]
B
Now converting that into other output is like obviously the thing that everyone's focused on. I want to see at some point that the economic infrastructure that we're helping create and the economic velocity that is actually going to be measurable because it's all measurable on chain. I want to see measurable increases in economic velocity that actually lead to measurable increases in global GDP and prosperity. And I'm not going to be happy until I can actually see that and measure that. And that's, you know, that's. We're not there. We're not, we're not there. We're not even close to there right now. And so you know, that, that animates my, my work as I think about.
- [86:46]
A
In the early days when you digitize system systems, there's deceptive growth that eventually becomes disruptive growth and it dematerializes, demonetizes and democratizes the world.
- [86:56]
B
So I love it.
- [86:58]
A
Congratulations Jeremy on that. Where do we find you on the the world wide Web? Your what's your handles?
- [87:05]
B
Yeah, so best is is JR lair on x.com and yeah, that's like that's my public handle. And then otherwise you can check out what I'm working on@circle.com.
- [87:19]
A
Amazing. Imad and Salim and Jeremy, we're going to all see each other in, in riyadh in about 10 days time.
- [87:28]
B
Looking forward to it.
- [87:29]
A
Yeah, it's going to be fun. Celine, how's your week?
- [87:31]
D
Some USDC for you to sign, Jeremy.
- [87:35]
B
That's it. I could like do a sign. I can use a digital signature.
- [87:40]
A
Imod, how's your week ahead, buddy?
- [87:43]
C
The work always continues, buddy.
- [87:46]
A
You know, it's so funny. I get a text from imod at like 6 o' clock at night and I go, where are you? He goes, I'm in London. And you're still awake? Because I'm always awake. Oh well, amazing.
- [87:57]
B
That's good.
- [87:58]
A
All right guys. Gentlemen, a real pleasure and we're excited for USDC and for the world that Circle is creating. Thank you. It's going to spawn a million new entrepreneurs, probably, you know, 100 million new entrepreneurs and make the world faster than.
- [88:12]
D
A huge congrats on everything.
- [88:14]
B
Just incredible. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you guys so much.
- [88:17]
A
Thank you so much. Every week my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform form industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you. I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends ten years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dashmandis.com metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. Alright, now back to this episode. SA.