🪙 “”Stablecoins” — Interview with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire (Philosopher of the Coin)

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Best One Yet

Episode: “Stablecoins” — Interview with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire (Philosopher of the Coin)
Date: April 3, 2026
Hosts: Nick Tomaino & Jack Tatar
Guest: Jeremy Allaire, CEO & Founder of Circle

Episode Overview

This episode is a deep dive into the world of stablecoins—the “boringest” but arguably most transformative aspect of cryptocurrency—through an engaging conversation with Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle and creator of USDC (USD Coin). Known for his philosophical approach and as a foundational figure in the fintech revolution, Jeremy unpacks the journey, utility, and game-changing potential of stablecoins, especially USDC, in modernizing global finance. The episode covers the technology behind stablecoins, their relationship to fiat, regulatory considerations, industry impact, and the broader financial paradigm shifts they are driving.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Crypto Market Turbulence: Setting the Stage

• Complexity & Volatility
  • Jeremy describes the current macro climate: volatility in both crypto and traditional markets, de-dollarization, and economic uncertainty.

  “All bets are off.” (Jeremy Allaire, 01:43)

  • Leverage, deleveraging events, and global uncertainty are common to both tech stocks and crypto.

2. Jeremy Allaire’s Origin Story and Philosophical Approach

• The Apple II Spider Bite:
  • Receiving an Apple II computer in the early 1980s was transformative, inspiring a sense of democratization and empowerment.

  “We experienced this as a tool of radical empowerment... This was like the Gutenberg Press.” (Jeremy Allaire, 03:17)

• From Bitcoin to Stablecoins:
  • Jeremy was fascinated by the technical breakthrough of bitcoin, seeing it as a new infrastructure layer for the internet, not just a digital asset.
  • Unlike bitcoin maximalists, he saw greater opportunity in building a “missing layer” for handling money on the open internet.

3. What Is a Stablecoin?

• The Streaming Analogy:
  • Hosts liken stablecoins to streaming vs. cable TV: digital dollars (USDC) make money programmable, instant, and accessible like streaming transformed entertainment.

  “Fiat currency is cable TV... Stablecoins are Seinfeld on streaming.” (Jack Tatar, 10:11)

  • Jeremy’s analogy: “over-the-top Internet money”—the infrastructure of money is now as open and programmable as digital media. (06:11)
• Why Stablecoins?
  • The US dollar is ubiquitous, but lacks a natively digital, global, always-on protocol—stablecoins solve this.
  • Goal: Move the $60T of non-interest bearing deposits and physical cash into natively digital form (13:06).

4. The Need for (and Problems with) Digital Dollars

• Global Access and Efficiency:
  • Today’s system is “like a 1955 Chevy truck,” slow, friction-filled, outdated.
  • Examples: future remittances, instant global transactions, fewer intermediaries, less friction.

  “I want to be able to directly transact at the speed of the Internet at no cost.” (Jeremy Allaire, 14:39)

• Why is Financial Infrastructure So Outdated?
  • Heavy regulation, legacy tech, and inertia have kept money pipes slow for decades (16:04).
  • Banks and payment services use tech from the 70s–90s “under the hood.”

  “These industries that have a lot of friction tend to be more highly regulated.” (Jeremy Allaire, 16:04)

5. Risk, Trust, and Regulation

• Are There Benefits to Financial Slowness?
  • Some delays help with fraud and risk controls. Jeremy argues technology and social risk controls can coexist, and actually improve in a digital system:

  “We can build something ground up that is natively digital... and then build the mechanism around it to address those social risks.” (Jeremy Allaire, 18:45)

• Transparency & Reserves:
  • Circle’s USDC reserves: Mostly short-duration US Treasuries, some cash in top-tier custody banks. All holdings are transparent and auditable.

  “You can see the amount that’s in circulation in real time at all times.” (Jeremy Allaire, 20:45; 21:53)

  • Fun moment: The dollar is, at its core, “an Oracle database with Sun Microsystems computers.” (Jeremy Allaire, 23:20)

6. Stablecoins vs. Traditional Finance

• How Stable is a Stablecoin?

  “We have always redeemed every single USDC... for a dollar... we are required by law to redeem one for one.” (Jeremy Allaire, 26:50)

  • USDC is fully backed, always redeemable, never lent out—this is “the boringest” but most reliable part of crypto.
• The Impact on Payments & Finance:
  • Major companies like Stripe and Shopify now support USDC by default, offering transaction fees 1/3 those of Visa or Mastercard (29:40–30:38).
  • Stablecoins enable both microtransactions (AI agents paying each other) and large-scale capital flows (digital bond settlements).
  • Over time, existing intermediaries like Visa must adapt or risk being outmoded by new “plumbing.”

7. Future Impact & Who Loses?

• Credit Card Companies & Intermediaries:
  • Lower payment fees will cut into incumbents’ revenue models.
  • But established brands like Visa may roll out their own stablecoin solutions.
• Scale & Network Effects:
  • Growth could reach several trillion dollars worth of stablecoins in circulation over the next decade.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Circle doesn’t sell memes, they sell plumbing.” – Jack Tatar (00:52)
• “Bitcoin is your crazy cousin, but stablecoins are your smart uncle.” – Nick Tomaino (00:54)
• “Stablecoin is the same thing [as money], but it’s much quicker and smoother and more frictionless and more flexible and built on just the Internet.” – Jack Tatar (10:11)
• “You can see the amount that’s in circulation in real time at all times.” – Jeremy Allaire (20:45)
• “The dollar is like an Oracle database sitting out there... quantitative easing is like a SQL insert statement.” – Jeremy Allaire (23:20)
• “Stablecoins are poised to become a much larger part of the global financial system... supporting dramatically more efficient capital markets, dramatically more efficient economic participation.” – Jeremy Allaire (31:29)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Crypto context & market turbulence: 01:41–02:45
• Jeremy’s early inspiration (Apple II): 03:10–04:48
• Bitcoin "spider bite": 04:48–05:41
• What is a stablecoin/analogy: 05:59–10:40
• Digital dollars & access: 13:06–15:23
• Why financial plumbing is outdated: 15:23–17:40
• Risk, fraud, and transparency: 18:05–19:56
• Circle’s reserves & transparency: 20:45–23:40
• How stable are stablecoins: 26:36–27:57
• Future winners/losers — payment disruption: 27:57–31:20
• The takeaway: 31:25–32:26
• Rapid-fire (books, business, restaurant): 32:36–33:40

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Takeaway & Closing Thoughts

Jeremy’s core message:

“We are seeing the Internet colliding with the financial system... The scale of those changes are going to happen in the financial system. Circle is a critical infrastructure company... At the core is our stablecoin network with USDC. Stablecoins are poised to become a much larger part of the global financial system.” (31:29)

Hosts’ closing play:
“Plumbing can be sexy.” (32:26)
The episode wraps with rapid-fire questions and Jeremy’s playful self-ticker: “JDA.”

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a lucid, often witty walk through the real potential of stablecoins and the transformation of the global monetary system. Jeremy Allaire grounds the discussion with technical, philosophical, and practical perspectives, clarifying how Circle and USDC are building the digital money pipes—robust, transparent, and ready for scale—beneath the financial industry’s next era. For anyone wanting to understand the “smart uncle” side of crypto, this is essential listening.

Transcript

[Nick Tomaino]

Yetis, buckle up your blockchain and hold onto your digital wallet because today's interview

[Jack Tatar]

is a deep dive into the only part of crypto designed to do something, not just sit in your account.

[Nick Tomaino]

That's right. We're hanging out with Jeremy Allaire, the philosopher, founder and CEO of Circle.

[Jack Tatar]

No joke about the philosopher. This dude studied Nietzsche before revolutionizing the

[Nick Tomaino]

US dollar, and now he's leading a financial revolution, but with the boringest crypto of all, the stablecoin.

[Jack Tatar]

Jeremy's baby is Circle, a company. Circle's baby USDC, the US dollar coin

[Nick Tomaino]

and his company Circle IPO'd last year and rose 250% in its first two days on the stock market.

[Jack Tatar]

Today, Circle is worth $14 billion. That's two lifts. And now Circle is handling eight times more transactions than Visa does.

[Nick Tomaino]

Because he didn't chase volatility, he chased stability.

[Jack Tatar]

Circle doesn't sell memes, they sell plumbing.

[Nick Tomaino]

And today, Jeremy will tell us why. Bitcoin is your crazy cousin, but stablecoins are your smart uncle.

[Jack Tatar]

If there's a Mount Rushmore of crypto, Jeremy's on it.

[Nick Tomaino]

And he's the only one mountain who has not been sued.

[Jack Tatar]

Besties, please welcome the bard of blockchains, the Confucius of currency, the Darwin of digital dollars.

[Nick Tomaino]

Jeremy Allaire is the founder and CEO of Circle.

[Jack Tatar]

And today's interview with Jeremy is the best one yet.

[Nick Tomaino]

Jeremy, fantastic to have you with us from the World Trade center in New York City.

[Jeremy Allaire]

How you doing over there? I'm doing really good, thank you. I was actually very excited to hear that. I'm a plumber. It's the trades.

[Jack Tatar]

We need more people in the trades.

[Jeremy Allaire]

Yeah.

[Nick Tomaino]

But Jeremy, now that we get to have you with us, there is one question that Jack and I have always wanted to ask a crypto executive.

[Jack Tatar]

What the heck is going on with crypto right now?

[Jeremy Allaire]

The thesis going around right now is effectively like a single asset hedge fund that was like on the yen carry, like had a multi strategy leveraged multi strategy across gold across Bitcoin. The reality is you had a lot of leverage piling in and then you had a huge deleveraging event. Whether that was caused by a single trader or macro conditions or a set of other things. It's a complex environment right now. And I'm not just talking about crypto. You look at the volatility, these 10%, 15% moves in Microsoft, let alone Bitcoin, and the kind of on again, off again. Is the economy being destroyed? Is the economy going to be supercharged? Does it matter if there's job losses? Do we need job growth? What's the price of money? All of these, like the fundamental assumptions we've had on macro, on a lot of things, and on tech cycles and other stuff, they're really being thrown in the air. And then you have the de dollarization that is sell America the gold trade. You know, kind of all bets are off.

[Nick Tomaino]

Yeah, we'll be at $1 million next year or we'll be at zero. Either way, we'll probably be chatting with you again, Jeremy. But Jack, do you want to jump into Jeremy's heroic origin story here?

[Jack Tatar]

You know, Nick and I are huge fans of Batman and every hero has their origin story. Spider man got bit by a spider. Superman came from another planet. You got an Apple II computer. Which seems to be in every tech visionary's Wikipedia page is that moment with the Apple ii.

[Nick Tomaino]

Why was getting a computer. Why was getting that computer so transformative for the future of your life and changing an industry?

[Jeremy Allaire]

Yeah, it's really interesting, you know, so it was like 1982, 1983 was like the timeframe. And my dad was kind of into tech, but he was not a technology person at all. He was in mental health work. And we would go to the. There was the Radio Shack. We had periodically would buy Byte magazine, which was the early magazine about personal computer revolution and all this stuff. And the Apple II just seemed like the coolest computer. We experienced this as a tool of radical empowerment and as a tool of democratization. And as a tool of. This was like the Gutenberg Press. Right. It was revolutionary for publishing. You could organize data, you could connect, like what I just talked about, there are ways to connect. And so it was like a revolutionary tool. And the lore of the entrepreneurs was also there. So if you were paying attention, for us teenagers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mitch Kapoor, who created the spreadsheet and Lotus and all that, but the pioneers were known and it was like, wow, these are the people who are revolutionizing the future. So that was really important. And then using those tools, becoming conversant in them and being able to use them kind of led to other future opportunities, other things that I was able to do as well. But I think that was definitely the spider bite or whatever you want to call it.

[Nick Tomaino]

Yeah, well, your next spider bite. And actually you've had a few cool spider bites with superpowers. But the bitcoin white paper 2008 and

[Jeremy Allaire]

really when I kind of came across Bitcoin, it was like these two worlds, like kind of Boom, they came together. And I was like, oh, my God. It wasn't that I thought bitcoin itself was the answer. I mean, I think for some people who are bitcoin maximalists, it's sort of bitcoin is the holy thing and it's the one thing. But I looked at it and said, this is a computer science breakthrough. It is solving a set of technology problems that haven't been solved on the Internet. It's helping kind of envision and develop a missing infrastructure layer of the Internet. And the more I read and the more I got involved in the early technical communities and the like and the ideas that people were putting forward for how this could evolve, I was totally convinced that this was going to be a fundamental infrastructure layer of the Internet.

[Nick Tomaino]

Well, Jeremy, this is what Jack and I find fascinating. What you end up pursuing is our big question on this podcast today. You end up pursuing the opposite of bitcoin in both name and structure. You pursue the stablecoin. So Jack and I have been wondering what the heck really is a stablecoin.

[Jack Tatar]

Our analogy when we first covered your IPO last year was Netflix. So think of fiat currency as the dvd stablecoins as streaming. What's your analogy to explain what a stablecoin is?

[Jeremy Allaire]

Well, so actually I like that one. I'll try some other stuff. But for Circle, I ran a company called brightcove, which was like a video platform company and was in the early days, sort of streaming television on the Internet and building the infrastructure for that. And so I like to talk about stablecoins as over the top Internet money. Right? Like Netflix is over the top. It's like over the top television. It goes over the top, the Internet, you don't need the old physical infrastructure,

[Jack Tatar]

but anyway don't need to pay $10 a month to Verizon for like the cable bo.

[Jeremy Allaire]

Yeah, the core idea here is the Internet did not have. It does now, but it did not have a native data type for money. Like we had like audio files and image files and text files, and then we had protocols for how those could be transferred around. But there was no native way to represent money on the Internet. And there were no specific protocols that worked like these other protocols where anyone could plug in, connect and, and use them. And Bitcoin demonstrated that you could in fact build native money on the Internet. And the Bitcoin protocol and blockchain networks, the coordination mechanism, demonstrated that you could build a protocol that could allow this open access. And so for me, when I looked at the financial system at the time the concept was, well, it may be that sound money, money like bitcoin is in 30 or 50 years gonna be what everyone wants. And you can debate that. I don't wanna debate that. But the reality is, at least for the next decades, fiat money, which is sort of government obligation money, let's just

[Nick Tomaino]

call it regular everyday dollar bills, dollars

[Jeremy Allaire]

that have the full fiat and credit of a government. Right. It's the US government or Zimbabwean currency, it's a different story. But the idea of taking that form of money, but a very, very safe version of that. So what I call a full reserve dollar, and this is really important, we can come back to it, which is sort of fractional reserve banking. How does that work? Full reserve banking, where the money doesn't get lent out, it just is there. But having a very simple way to express in a digital currency form a dollar, but have it be usable just like mp3 files, streaming audio, streaming television, open, accessible to any device, any software, anywhere in the world. And obviously with this technology programmable so that entrepreneurs and software creators can innovate with it in the same way we've innovated with software with information and media on the Internet. So when we did that for data and content and software on the Internet, we drove the marginal cost of kind of producing and distributing those things to zero. And when we drove the marginal cost of sort of publishing and distributing, whether it be audio or video or data or software, to zero, the net world output of that thing just like went exponential, like hugely exponential. And you created this huge velocity of those things. And so my belief was that, hey, if we could do that for dollars, we could unlock Internet superpowers for dollars and we could create a dramatically more accessible, open, efficient financial system. And that, that actually if you could do that, there's a lot of other ideas involved, but if you could do that, you could really improve economic outcomes for the world.

[Nick Tomaino]

So like what the MP3 did for a Coldplay song and, and for the entire streaming and music industry you think can be done for the entire financial industry?

[Jeremy Allaire]

I think, yeah, yeah, Nick, let me,

[Jack Tatar]

let me, let me try to update our Netflix analogy. So yeah, please, Jack, Stablecoins are streaming, but it's like a streaming episode of Seinfeld. Seinfeld existed before Stablecoins. It was just on cable tv. So I think like fiat currency is cable tv. And we could watch Seinfeld, but you could only watch it at 6:30 on one channel. And it was expensive.

[Nick Tomaino]

Yeah.

[Jack Tatar]

And you had to sign up for a 24 month contract with your cable provider you did not like. You had to watch ads. If you ran to the bathroom. You're going to miss that funny Newman moment. So stablecoin is the same thing. It's Seinfeld. It's money, but it's much quicker and smoother and more frictionless and more flexible and built on just the Internet instead of coaxial cables that came out of your wall and went into the cable box.

[Nick Tomaino]

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[Jack Tatar]

Jeremy, why are stablecoins necessary? So US Dollar coin is a blockchain digitized version of the dollar. What's wrong with the regular dollar?

[Jeremy Allaire]

I mean, a couple things. So there's nothing wrong with the dollar. Okay. So the dollar is the most widely used currency in the world. It is used for about 90% of transactions internationally. It undergirds capital markets. It's very widely used. What's been missing is an actual way to have that money exist in a purely digital form that can be used on the open Internet by any person in the world. And so this is about opening up access to the financial system. For example, if you take the stock of dollars in the world or the stock of money in the world, there's about $120 trillion worth of electronic money in the world today. And then if you take a subset of that or of sort of aggregate money, what's called M2 money, there's about $60 trillion of money which is physical cash or kind of non interest bearing deposits in banks around the world. And what we're trying to do is upload and upgrade that to be natively on the Internet and take on all the capabilities that the Internet offers. So for example, I as a person, I take for granted that I can take this device here and I can open up an app and I can have like an HD video call with someone in China and it just works. As a person, I want the same capability with the economic system. I want to be able to transact directly with any person anywhere in the world. Whether I'm an individual who's got like I'm making a bet on a sports outcome.

[Nick Tomaino]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Allaire]

Or I'm someone who has family that lives in the Philippines or is in India and I need to move money for my family's well being or I'm like a big oil trader that has to move value from Brazil to the Middle east to here and it's $100 million anything, I want to be able to directly transact that at the speed of The Internet at no cost. And I want to reduce all the intermediaries that are involved. And I want to take the friction out and take the cost out. And I want to make it more open and accessible and transparent and efficient. And that's provably a better experience for people. And that's why when people start using USDC and they start moving around, they're like, oh my God, I cannot believe, I can't believe I'm doing this.

[Nick Tomaino]

Let's sprinkle on some context here. Why is the US money system the way we all send each other money? Why does it look like a 1955 Chevy pickup truck that needs an update when everyone could be driving electric vehicles right now?

[Jack Tatar]

I can't believe we still write physical checks in the United States which take days to clear.

[Nick Tomaino]

I can't believe I gotta pay Venmo in order to get jack cash asap because I lost a Super bowl bet with him.

[Jack Tatar]

Otherwise it's five days. I can't believe selling a stock on Robinhood, I don't have access to that money until two days after I push sell.

[Nick Tomaino]

Like why is the system set up for this? Is it on purpose or is it just it's badly in need of an update, like that old Chevy? Like what's the reason for us being in this archaic situation?

[Jeremy Allaire]

Yeah, I mean look, there are technologies and industries that have evolved that are highly regulated. So I think one has been the historical kind of regulation that exists. Yeah, we've seen that. I mean the transportation system, it took a really long time to get electric cars to be allowed or it's taking a really long time to get self driving cars to be allowed as a sort of simple example. But you know, these, these industries that have a lot of friction in them tend to be more, more highly regulated. You know, it takes a kind of from the bottom up approach to address and change these things in order to get the kind of outcomes that you want. And so the firms that have kind of run the way money moves around have been highly regulated, have a lot of kind of restrictions on what they've been able to do. And I really think it took the Internet and Internet software colliding with the financial system to finally get us to a point where we could reinvent that. And most kind of our experiences, like your Venmo experience or a bank transfer or other things, it's kind of like you might have a friendly user interface on the mobile device, but like underneath under the hood, it literally is, there's technology from the 70s, the 80s the 90s, et cetera, and sort of been gradually, layer upon layer, kind of crufted up on top of it. And I think our view is like, this is a deep tech problem. Solve it at the fundamental level, get to the very, very base layer, get the very essentials, start from first principles, build it from the ground up on the Internet, on this architecture, this DNA of the Internet that I talked about earlier that will give us the ab to transform. And that's what's happening.

[Jack Tatar]

Yeah, money moves so slowly because it's running on pipes that are built in the 1950s and it takes a long time, they're rusty. You're building a new set of pipes that run at the speed of the Internet.

[Jeremy Allaire]

Yeah, I mean literally tens of trillions of dollars of transactions are flowing through USDC now. And that's just directly on the Internet between people, machines, businesses, others. And so it's happening already in a really meaningful scale.

[Nick Tomaino]

But Jack, I want to ask one, follow up to that because Jeremy, Jack and I before we, our media company, and over a decade before this, we worked in finance. Jack and I were both at banks in New York. And there is a counterargument to make here that maybe slow is sometimes good. And I'm thinking from the protection standpoint, when it comes to risk assessment or bad activities, fraudulent activities, there is a benefit to there being a delay in the system and it not being instantaneous and anonymous. And is that a purposeful reason for why our system is so archaic looking and so slow right now? Like, is there a benefit to that that we may miss if we start from scratch?

[Jeremy Allaire]

Look, I think risk is real and we have systems, you know, that, that have to do with criminal abuse or market misconduct. You know, that's sort of a big thing in capital markets, obviously, you know, known actors, you know, et cetera. And we have to kind of separate these, what I consider to be like social risks, which are very real from the fundamentals of technology. And so our view is that we can build something from the ground up that is natively digital, natively on the Internet, has the speed, velocity, efficiency, all these things. And then we can build the mechanism around it that addresses those social risks. And that's exactly what's happening. Right. So all around the world, digital wallets that speak, blockchain protocols, the people who kind of provide those have to know who you are, like provide your id. If you're doing a whole bunch of transactions really fast and you don't know where they're going and coming from, you're going to get investigated. The controls that are part of what I consider the social contract between financial intermediaries and society, those are important, but I think actually we can improve them.

[Nick Tomaino]

Yeah, you're basically a financial infrastructure company too.

[Jeremy Allaire]

We are, yes, we are.

[Nick Tomaino]

I mean Jack, honestly the other analogy I think of here is like what robo taxi industry says. Like what Waymo would say is like we're not going to be perfect at this, but compared to the status quo, we're going to be providing a more transparent solution in a lot of ways that's trackable.

[Jack Tatar]

And you know Jeremy, Nick and I, whenever we hear about a digital innovation, we know that there's an underlying physical thing somewhere.

[Nick Tomaino]

Yeah.

[Jack Tatar]

And for circle, the underlying physical thing is a US dollar being held somewhere. Do you have a vault with massive stacks of dollar bills?

[Jeremy Allaire]

I do have a funny story on this, Jeremy.

[Jack Tatar]

I'd love to know how many USDC are out there and how many US dollars do you have in your vault

[Nick Tomaino]

and where do you keep it and what's the code?

[Jeremy Allaire]

The nice thing about USDC is first of all you can see the amount that's in circulation in real time at all times. And so I can tell you right now, like looking at CoinMarketCap, it's polling. There's 73.19 billion USDC in circulation right now.

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[Jeremy Allaire]

now what we do is we're regulated and we have a whole bunch of stuff that we have to do by law in terms of how we hold the reserves. And so the first is that we're basically only allowed to hold the reserves in the safest high quality liquid assets which are basically short duration U.S. government Treasury bonds, treasury collateralized repurchase agreements with with global systemically important banks and we can hold some in cash with the largest custody banks in the world, like a bank of New York Mellon. And so that's really what USDC is. And we actually provide daily transparency into that. You can go and search for something called USDXX on Google or whatever, OpenAI and you can actually see every single Q sip, the serial number of every single bond instrument that sits there. So you can sort of see everything you hold, everything you hold. Now the funny story I was going to say is that what is the actual dollar? And I actually had a chance a number of years ago sitting with the chief information officer of the Federal Reserve and I said, I'm a tech guy, I'm like, tell me, I want to know the actual architecture of the dollar. What is it? What kind of infrastructure? What is it? This may not be true anymore, so I'm not going to rep this as the case. But what he basically said was, is that but the dollar is Oracle databases with Sun Microsystems mini computers that are in distributed clusters and that's it, that's

[Nick Tomaino]

our whole financial system.

[Jeremy Allaire]

The dollar is like an Oracle database sitting out there. And I used to joke quantitative easing, which is the Fed pumping money into that is like if you know, it's like a SQL insert statement, like insert new records.

[Jack Tatar]

And Jeremy, what percent are you holding in cash? Because that's the only part of your reserves that isn't making money.

[Jeremy Allaire]

The cash part we actually disclose and you can get it on the transparency pages on circle.com, we actually disclose the details on cash, all the securities, treasuries, et cetera. And we actually talk about in our public disclosures what we call the reserve return rate. And then we have what we call other revenue that reflects the fact that we have been really diversifying the different platforms that we operate and the different kind of products that we offer, from developer infrastructure to blockchain infrastructure, whether you're a bank or you're a startup or everything in between to if you want to build on the Internet financial system, we give you the stack, we give you the digital wallet tools, the infrastructure tools, the actual digital currency. Everything that's needed to build and operate a financial application on the Internet built on this kind of stack.

[Nick Tomaino]

Jeremy, to dive in t boy style to that for a sec. This is like a super simple question but still can't square it in our heads. Can a US dollar coin, a form of crypto, your stablecoin ever not be $1? And also at the same time circle the company, you know the stock is down since its IPO it's surged on the ipo, it's down right now. How can the company operate so differently and the stock acts so differently from the underlying cryptocurrency that you run, which is based on the US Dollar?

[Jeremy Allaire]

Well, I mean, there are a couple things. So one is just cir business. We run financial infrastructure platforms as a business. We have the infrastructure that scales this network and we want to grow the network. We want to grow the number of nodes on the network, applications on the network, developers on the network, activity on the network. And in growing that, we believe that the stock of money on that network is also going to grow. There's a lot of different views on this. One view is if you take Secretary of Treasury Bessant, who will sort of say, hey, I think that this innovation of digital dollars in the form of stablecoins are going to keep growing. They're going to be exported all around the world. People are going to want to use these. This is a powerful way for the US to compete in dollars in the future. That could grow to several trillion dollars in circulation in the coming years. There's a lot of different views. Analysts have different views, but it could be a trillion, 2, 3, 4 trillion dollars of these dollar stablecoins that are out there. We intend to be a continued major leader. We're the largest regulated stablecoin network in the world. We want to maintain that position and growth it. And so you've got kind of CAGRs over, say, forward periods, people ranging from 25% CAGRs to 60% CAGRs. And that growth is a backdrop that we're building into. It's this new utility for money on the Internet and we're growing into that.

[Nick Tomaino]

But Jeremy, on the dollar coin point, just curious about it. It's almost like Jack and I were seeing this as like at a, at a high school cafeteria, like Bitcoin is getting all the attention. It's like the jock at the table, Ethereum's like hot and walking around, you're kind of the nerd at the other end of the table not doing anything.

[Jeremy Allaire]

Yes. We used to say, like, we're, we're like the boringest. We're the boring thing. It's like it's always a dollar. Why is it always a dollar, man?

[Jack Tatar]

You're a very stable CEO for a stablecoin company.

[Nick Tomaino]

So can can a dollar coin, a stable coin like that ever not be worth $1?

[Jeremy Allaire]

So we have always redeemed every single USDC that's ever been sought to redeem for A dollar, that is a covenant and we're required by law to redeem one for one. So we are licensed and regulated now, not just from sea to shining sea, but across the world. And there's regulations around us in Asia, in Europe, in the US and in the Middle east and in other. And like tons of places are regulating us. We are required. That redemption, right, is a core premise and that's why the, the structure is set up so that it's always redeemable, meaning we don't take the money that you give us and say, hey, we're going to give some car loans or we're going to make some factory loans and we're going to do some consumer credit and all this stuff. It's just sitting there, it's full reserve. And that is to provide that one for one redemption capability. And that's key. I mean, that's really, really fundamental to the proposition. And people on the Internet understand that. They're like, oh, this is always a dollar. I can always trade it for a dollar, redeem it for a dollar, moves around the Internet as a dollar. But it has all these technological superpowers.

[Jack Tatar]

Yeah. Hey Jeremy, if your five and ten year plans succeed, who loses? And my suspicion is, or a quick thought of mine is that credit card companies might lose because you said that you don't charge a transaction fee. Credit card companies very much do up to like 3% and that's a, a huge tax on so much spending that happens in this economy. Are people flocking to circle to avoid credit card fees?

[Jeremy Allaire]

Yeah, no. I mean, I think there's a couple things. I think one is that when we think about the use cases, and I will directly answer your question as well, but when we think about the use cases for this, it's general purpose, general architecture money. Meaning right now there are, you've probably seen this proliferation of AI agents that are flying around. Like there's protocols for AI agents now to pay each other directly in USDC and on blockchains. And that's happening. And there's like actually a USDC hackathon running right now run by AI agents. They run a hackathon and they're making the choices on it. And we chipped in 30,000 USDC as like prize money. So you have everything from like microtransactions that are happening there, which would be impossible with any existing payment system, all the way to the other end. Where recently JP Morgan sold a digital bond for a company and they sold the digital bond for, I think it was like, I Don't know the exact number, but like 100 million USDC. And then the USDC was actually the proceeds that went to the issuer of the bond. And so everything from. You're not going to do that with a credit card, obviously.

[Nick Tomaino]

So, Jeremy, do you and Jamie Dimon talk?

[Jeremy Allaire]

Yeah, absolutely. I have a huge amount of respect for the firm, obviously. And they're moving into this whole world as well. Right. They're moving into digital currency, digital assets, digital bonds, all this kind of stuff. Yeah. So I think the traditional intermediaries on transactions, whether it's like buying a cup of coffee, the proverbial thing, or buying a product online or paying the street vendor, whatever that is, those retail transactions will benefit from this. And you actually see that like stripe today out of the box you can turn on USDC payment acceptance and it's a third the cost of taking a credit card payment. So they've done that. Shopify another one. They make USDC a default checkout option. If you have a Shopify store, it's just there. And not only do they make it a default checkout option, they pay you the merchant. It makes sense, 50 basis points because

[Nick Tomaino]

it saves them money. Yeah, right.

[Jeremy Allaire]

We're in the early days of those changes. We're in the very early days of those changes. But I think certainly over the coming five to 10 years that will change. Now, a company like Visa is an extraordinary company and they have relationships with gazillions of people and gazillions of merchants and they probably can figure out just like HBO Max is an amazing product and people use that just like Netflix, Visa is going to have their digital version that's running on stablecoins and stuff as well. And so I think it's an open question like how do existing intermediaries move to this? Do the unit economics change? How do they change? How does that affect their long term P and L? That we don't know. But we do know the changes are going to happen.

[Nick Tomaino]

So Jack, we always end the story by whipping up the takeaway. Shall we have Jeremy do it for us?

[Jack Tatar]

Yes. Jeremy, what's your takeaway on stablecoins USDC Circle?

[Jeremy Allaire]

I mean, my takeaway is this. We are seeing the Internet colliding with the financial system and everything that happened with the Internet, with media communications, software, commerce, those sets of changes and the scale of those changes are going to happen in the financial system. Circle is a critical infrastructure company. As part of that, we are building an Internet financial platform company in the spirit of other Internet platform companies that Built critical utilities for those other changes in the Internet. At the core of that is obviously our stablecoin network with usdc. Stablecoins are poised to become a much larger part of the global financial system, representing and holding trillions of dollars of value, supporting dramatically more efficient capital markets, dramatically more efficient economic participation. And yeah, we're just trying to. We're trying to build that up.

[Nick Tomaino]

Basically a takeaway. And your takeaway. The plumbing can be sexy. So, Jeremy, before we let you go though, some rapid fire questions. What is the best brand in crypto that isn't Circle?

[Jeremy Allaire]

Oh, you can't do that to me. What I'll say is that Hyperliquid has done an incredible job establishing an extraordinary brand with a very small team in a very short period of time of highly, highly enthusiastic supporters behind that. And so I'll give them a shout out.

[Jack Tatar]

What's the best business book you've ever read?

[Jeremy Allaire]

Oh, man, I have a dirty little secret. I don't read a lot of business books.

[Nick Tomaino]

All right. Best book you've ever read?

[Jeremy Allaire]

The best book I've ever read. It's probably like I think you were saying, I read Nietzsche, but maybe it was the Plague by Albert Camus or something like that.

[Nick Tomaino]

Best business leader you admire?

[Jeremy Allaire]

I admire Tim Cook.

[Nick Tomaino]

And finally, Jeremy, best restaurant in New York City, where you're based.

[Jeremy Allaire]

Oh, come on. Yeah, you know, I order takeout from Digg. Big fans of Digg.

[Nick Tomaino]

Great lunchbowl.

[Jack Tatar]

And if you, Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, were a stock, what would be your three or four letter stock ticker symbol?

[Jeremy Allaire]

No, you can just use my, my initials. Jda.

[Jack Tatar]

Jeremy stablecoins. It's an abstract concept. It's a thing that lives in the digital world but has a physical footprint. Thank you for explaining it so deeply and comprehensively to our audience. Really interesting what you're doing. Thanks for coming on the show.

[Jeremy Allaire]

Thank you, guys. Thought of.

[Nick Tomaino]

Fine.

[Autotrader Mom]

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[Autotrader Kid]

Really?

[Autotrader Mom]

At a playground?

[Autotrader Kid]

Yeah. Really? Look at these listings from dealers.

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[Autotrader Kid]

Really?

[Autotrader Mom]

And you just put in your info and boom. Cars in your budget.

[Autotrader Kid]

Mom needs a second.

[Autotrader Mom]

Honey, you can really have it delivered.

[Autotrader Kid]

Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership.

[Jeremy Allaire]

One sec, sweetie.

[Autotrader Mom]

Mommy's buying a car. I think your kid is walking up the slide, Kyle.

[Autotrader Kid]

Again? Really? Auto trader. Buy your car online? Really?