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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Rundown interview edition. Today we are talking to the CFO of Circle, Jeremy Fox Geem. Circle is the company behind usdc, one of the biggest stablecoins in the world. Jeremy's been CFO for about five years now, and the last 12 months have been the most important stretch in the company's history. Circle went public last June. USDC has grown to nearly $78 billion in circulation. And stablecoins are going from a crypto niche thing to something that major bank banks and institutions are actually building on. So in this conversation, we got into why stablecoin adoption is accelerating so fast, the real world use cases that are driving it, and a really interesting angle on how AI agents could be the next big wave for this technology. I learned a lot from this conversation. I think you guys are going to really enjoy it. So let's get into it. Jeremy Fox Gein, welcome to the Rundown.
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B
It's great to be here, Zayed. Thank you so much for having me.
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A
I'm excited for today's conversation. You know, I was looking through your LinkedIn like I do with a lot of our guests, and I saw that you've been the CFO of Circle for five plus years now. But you come from like a more of like a traditional background. Right. Like you, you, you got PwC on your resume, you got McKinsey. So I'm kind of curious what attracted you to the stablecoin slash crypto space, you know, five plus years ago.
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B
Yeah. And in five years in the digital asset world, in the crypto world, five years is, I think, many lifetimes.
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A
You're a veteran. Yes.
- [01:33]
B
Well, what. Yeah, and it's been a terrifically exciting time. But what really got me was a confluence of several things I've done in my past and several of the most exciting things that are happening in the world today. In many ways, blockchains are a missing layer of the Internet. Right? And blockchains plus the Internet allow things of value to exist in the Internet and to be programmed in new and different ways. And you put all of this together and you realize that the Internet had never yet disrupted the financial services industry. And the Internet had disrupted every other form of information exchange industry. But it hadn't yet come to financial services. And in many ways, the conceit when you understand it is you can move a photograph to anyone in the world nearly instantly, nearly for free. 24 7, 365. Why can't you do that with your money? And when I understood that, it was like, this is going to be transformative.
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A
Yeah, I mean, that's true. And I, I mean just looking at the, the adoption from stablecoin specifically, it's been absolutely crazy. I'm just looking at From C. From USDC, which is Circle Stablecoin, it's up, circulation's at $75 billion, which is up 72% year over year. So I'm kind of curious, like for stablecoins specifically, who are your largest users and what are they using stablecoins for right now?
- [03:00]
B
It's a great question and I ground it with the thought that, you know, the use cases for a better form of money technology are the use cases for money in its totality. Right. And the places where these new technologies are going to be adopted first are the places where the traditional costs and frictions are the greatest. And so you can kind of draw those lines and you can see who's building on these technologies today. So I'll wind it back. Right. The bootstrap use case for stablecoins was trading and settlements in the digital asset capital markets, in the crypto capital markets. Because to trade things and exchange things of value 24, 7, 365, you need 24, 7, 365 money. And out of that was born the stablecoin. Right, but a dollar. So let's actually start with saying what do we mean by a stablecoin? Right. A stablecoin is a dollar that exists natively in the Internet. And So Circle issues USDC, which as you notice the leading regulated stablecoin, there's nearly $79 billion today. Right. Of USDC in circulation. And that is a bearer asset like cash that you hold in a digital wallet that allows you to do things in the Internet. And so as I said, the bootstrap use case was buying and selling other forms of Internet based crypto assets. But because you can use that stablecoin and move that money anywhere in the world nearly instantly, nearly for free, it's broadened access to money and it has the superpowers of the Internet. So the next biggest use case is people around the world talk about broadening access. People around the world who would like to hold US dollars but for some other reason have just never been able to, are able to connect to the Internet and in many parts of the world more easily access US dollars. And so we see a grassroots adoption just of stablecoins as a store of value. People whose native countries and whose native currencies aren't performing very well may just simply choose to hold dollars. So that's kind of Big use case number two. But I talked about costs and frictions and using a stablecoin, right? This is the highest utility form of money ever invented and you can use them and send your money and money nearly instantly, nearly for free. So the next biggest use case as you might imagine is everything to do with cross border payments, right? That's where the frictions of money movement traditionally have been the greatest. And that starts just with remittance, human to human, right? It shouldn't cost 6% and take three days to send your money home. It just shouldn't cost you that to send it to England costs that to send it all over the world. And there's all these financial technology companies that have built on this and built better remittance systems but they're all just hacking on top of the original financial system. The stablecoin solve that remittance. Next up is kind of corporate and small business cross border payments flows, right? Those flows are growing very substantially because of the again just the frictions involved in your business trying to pay your suppliers, trying to pay your people, trying to pay your customers and receive money from your customers across the world. And then the last one I'll touch on before I pause and this is possibly the most exciting future looking one. Not that everything I have said so far isn't itself tremendously exciting, but is the growth in agentic commerce and more broadly agentic value exchange. When AI natively in code is going to do more and more economic activity, there's going to need to be a way to natively within code exchange value and we're starting to see stablecoins being used for that as well.
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A
That's very interesting. You laid out a lot of interesting things and I think I can personally talk about two of those things which is sending money internationally and then also like paying people internationally. So I've hired some contractors overseas. Sending money via USDC is just easy, fast, quick. And then I just remember I have like these memories of, you know, my parents are immigrants from Pakistan and they would send money overseas. Like I'm talking in the 90s. I remember having to go to these Western Union locations and having to like pay crazy fees. I think that's still a thing today. So I can kind of see like the, the allure of using something like a stablecoin where you can like send the money in US dollars right away with very minimal fees and it's there in seconds, right. So I think I, I can kind of personally kind of vouch for some of those use cases there. But do you ever see stablecoins kind of taking over like the day to day lives of people like you know, go to a coffee shop, do you envision people just transacting in stablecoins, you know, USDC there to buy a coffee at Starbucks? Or do you still see it as more of like a, a broader like use case for either sending money overseas or businesses using it for cross border payments?
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B
So the way I think about this, right, is just thinking about the use of stablecoins as what I call general purpose architecture for money. And you said it kind of people are going to use it in their everyday lives. And the answer is of course they are, but they're not going to think about it. Right? You don't think that you use Internet plumbing when you make a mob phone call, you're just making a phone call. And so when you tap to pay with your phone at Starbucks or at any other place like that, you don't think about the underlying mechanisms very much. Sure, you had to set up your credit card or maybe it was your debit card or you linked your bank account. And underneath all of this is like money plumbing. Stablecoins are a better form of infrastructure for money. And so over time, because it's better, which means cheaper, it means quicker and it means programmable. So because it's better, we will see in our view merchants and wallet companies and banks and all of the other places where you go to use your money. Adopting stablecoins and stablecoin Rails now you the consumer though tapping to buy a cup of coffee may not even know in five years time that you're using a stablecoin to you you're just going to be using money to make a payment. But under the hood things will be quicker, cheaper, programmable and that'll lead to benefits for everyone. Even if you as a consumer in the US don't feel those benefits direct immediately.
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A
What I do worry about though, I think you're right. But what I do worry about though is a lot of those credit card companies that have kind of built all these credit card reward programs that might be going away if like if they can't charge, you know, two and a half, 3% per transaction, we might be losing our credit card rewards soon.
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B
Now I think credit card rewards will evolve, right? The credit card companies aren't going anywhere in a hurry, right? They've built the most incredible networks and networks have network effects by the way, USDC and Circle, the usdc, stablecoin is itself a network business. And we can talk about what I mean, by those network effects. But the credit card companies have built great networks for good reason. Go back 50 years, a credit card was a magical invention. You mean you're telling me I can take a piece of plastic and pay for something and not have to give you the money and then you'll give me to. You said like a loyalty point scheme. This is tremendous innovation. It's time for the next wave of innovation, which is what's coming with the new technologies. But I don't see rewards programs going away. I think consumers like them too much. They'll just be new forms of rewards, differently issued.
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A
I, I hope so, because I'm not gonna lie, I'm not a credit card point snob or anything. But like, having that at the end of the year or for, you know, using it for a summer trip is always nice. I want to zoom out a little bit though, because I feel like there's been so much momentum that the, the stablecoin industry had over the last 12 months. You know, it started with the genius act that passed over the summer and then you guys had your IPO that was huge. Do. Is there a certain point, I guess, can you, can you, can you point to something that like got everyone's attention, including people on Wall Street, Washington? I mean, everyone started just kind of backing this, which doesn't ever happen anymore. What do you think got everyone so excited about stablecoins that they all passed the legislature?
- [10:56]
B
Yeah, well, somebody quipped to me recently that circle in USDC is sort of a 14 year overnight success story, which kind of gets to the point you're just making. So I don't think it's one thing. I. It's a confluence of many, many things. Right. So we launched USDC in 2018 and have been building with our partners ever since then. So this is not a new, new thing. But at the same time, it takes time for infrastructure to mature. It takes time for technologies to mature and become ready for primetime use. And this has been happening under the hood, if you like, in communities around the world of developers and builders and forward thinking companies who are saying, I can see the future and I'm going to be a leader rather than a follower. And so we've been working on this problem space for a very long time now. We've also always taken the view that money should be regulated. And you kind of talked about the genius act. And so around the world we've always walked in the front door, said who we are and what we're doing and explained that this is money and that in our belief it should be well regulated. And you know, we've been doing that in the U.S. jeremy Allaire, our co founder and CEO, spoke at the very first Senate hearing on digital assets. Right. I think it was 2013. And so we have been doing this for a long time. But as I said, many things come together. So the technologies matured, more and more people are using them, which captures imagination. We're heartened that the bipartisan effort to pass the Genius act succeeded. It's almost amazing that anything material gets through Congress. But let's be clear, digital asset regulation was a firmly bipartisan effort to put the United States at the forefront of kind of global competitiveness and make sure we stay there. So that was a good thing. And so you had technology maturing, people using regulation coming together and a sort of a wave of major companies finally being ready to embrace these new technologies and offer early products and services to their customers. And that all came together and exactly, exactly the time frame you were just talking about.
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A
Yeah, it's pretty, it's, yeah, it was huge. And I mean the momentum is still, you know, still people, that's still riding high today. I, what I find to be most interesting is that despite like this mini bear market that we're in, when it comes to the overall crypto markets, right, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, they're all down compared to their all time highs. You know, some are down more than 50%. But that hasn't impacted stablecoin adoption. In fact, stablecoin adoption, according to your latest earnings, is just continuing to be strong, I guess. Do you think, do you worry about the overall sentiment in the, in the, in the crypto markets when it comes to Bitcoin and Ethereum and what those are doing and how that might ultimately impact stablecoins at all?
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B
Look, I think the crypto markets are very important, right? Many, many people around the world participate them, participate in them, right. And have their financial, you know, life outcomes in many ways, right. Tied to how crypto in general is going. So we pay a lot of attention to the digital asset markets. But as I said at the beginning when you were asking about use cases, there are many, many other major buckets of users for stablecoins. And so although they were born in the digital asset markets, they've long ago decoupled. And so because you're seeing the growth in all of these other use cases, right, you're seeing growth not only in kind of the stock of stablecoins, right? As we said, USDC 79 billion in circulation today, the stock, if you like, is growing, but perhaps even more importantly, the usage of that money, the money velocity of that money, which is much higher than the money velocity of ordinary money, which makes sense when you consider the reduced friction in the using of this new form factor of money. So the use of stablecoins is growing even faster. And that's got frankly nothing to do with the vagaries of digital asset markets and crypto markets.
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A
Yeah, I mean, you know, I remember when bitcoin, you know, I hearing about bitcoin for a decade plus now and everyone's like, oh, bitcoin is a store of value and you can use it to transfer money overseas and whatnot. Well then you realize, like, it's too volatile to really be a store of value. And I always felt like crypto and bitcoin were always like, they were like a solution looking for a problem. And then I think the stable coins are an evolution of that where it's like, okay, well a stable coin has all the benefits of being on the blockchain, you know, low, low transfer fees and all that good stuff, yet it's not volatile and you might not lose half your net worth, you know, overnight because of, because of something. Who knows, right? So I think that's like a perfect evolution of, of, of just the crypto markets, you know. And then now we have stablecoins and like people are like, oh, I can actually use this. This is fantastic.
- [15:50]
B
Yeah. And what you're talking about is really the evolution of the underlying technology. Bitcoin is the token of the very first blockchain, the bitcoin blockchain. We think of blockchains as operating systems and we're now on, I don't know, the third generation, even the fourth generation, working on the fifth generation of blockchain operating systems. And these operating systems are growing more powerful and growing to the extent they have greater utility. The way to think about them is they offer sort of distributed state and distributed compute, right? You can run software in the latest operating systems. Ethereum was the first big innovation ability to provide a Turing complete computer system right. In a decentralized shared computer, which is a fascinating technological innovation. But what's really happening, right, the operating systems are evolving and we're moving into a world where because of these operating systems we can build what we like to think of as the Internet financial system. Right. And Circle is a company and there are lots of others who are working at the heart of building the Internet financial system. And what that really is is three layers and You've touched upon many of them so far in this. And we have in this conversation, right? There's a base layer. Think of that as the operating system layer. That's the blockchain, and those are evolving continually. Right. Then there's the digital asset layer. These are assets that have value that exist in the Internet in blockchains. And we talked about Bitcoin, which was the first, and we talked about usdc, which is a stablecoin, that's a dollar digital asset. But you can put many other types of assets onto blockchains. And we've got all of the crypto world, but we're also seeing, you know, tokenized money market funds. The financial system's looking at how to tokenize equities. People have done that in small places, issuing bonds on the blockchain, and there's benefits to this. And then at the third layer on top of that, you've got the application layer, which is where people are now building applications on the blockchains using these digital assets to solve real world kind of consumer and business and institutional needs. And so what's happened is just the evolution of all of that. As the technologies mature, you can do more and more with them. And ultimately though, the technology should fade into the background. Right. Just as the same way. It's a good example. You don't think about what is SMTP when you send an email. You just send an email. You're not worried about the underlying protocols or technologies. And the same will happen with the sort of various different pieces of crypto and blockchain technology and what I just try to characterize as the broader layers of the Internet financial system.
- [18:30]
A
How do you see Circle benefiting from the rise of AI agents and I guess. Yeah, I guess. Can you talk more about, can you talk more about that?
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B
Yes, I talked about the Internet financial system, Right. And those three layers, the operating system layer, the digital asset layer, and the application layer on top. Right. And Circle is building products at every level of that stack. So we have our blockchain Ark, which is in Testnet right now. That's going to come to mainnet later this year, which is purpose built for economic activity and financial services activity. Right. And we think the legacy blockchains, if you like, are not well optimized for regulated financial activity. We have various digital assets, right. With the largest US dollar, stablecoin, that's fully regulated usdc, we're the largest Euro stablecoin eurc, although it's much smaller, we are today the largest tokenized money market fund and so we have that and we have various applications, most notably the Circle payments network, right, that we're building at that third leg now Layer AI onto this. Our thesis is that more and more economic activity is going to take place in the Internet, intermediated by code, right? Running in the operating systems that we just talked about. And when you think about it, you ask the question, well, what's the largest operating system today? And people kind of think about Microsoft and they think about Apple and all these things, or Android, right? These are the big operating systems that we know. I'd actually reframe it and say the biggest operating system in the world today is like paper documents, lawyers, courts. This is how we actually do most economic activity. Still more and more of those contracts are going to become software intermediated contracts in code. And you've heard of smart contracts and that's really what those are. But then you layer on AI on top of that and what you have is sort of semi autonomous or even autonomous code driven agents. That's the word we've settled on agents, because they have agency, they can go do things. And so those agents are going to be interacting with the world and with each other. And their contracts will be intermediated in code, right? In the Internet financial operating system. And they will be doing things that create value and doing things that exchange value. Oversimplifying things. Imagine hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of agents doing things and paying each other to do so. Now all of that activity is going to take place on a blockchain. So we at Circle think that ARK is a very well engineered blockchain for those purposes. All of that economic activity is going to need Internet native money and other forms of assets, right, for that activity to take place. And so we have our position with USDC and EURC and there'll be other assets on the blockchain, but we think that activity will be paid for using money, right? And so we currently have that leading money stack and there'll be other applications as well that that will be built. And so we're actually rolling out products and skills for AIs to build on this stack, right? And for them to do this you're going to need new forms of payment technology. Back to that application layer, for example, you kind of talked about like have a credit card charge 2, 3% and you get your loyalty points. That ain't going to fly for an agent, right, who wants to do sort of rapid fire micro value exchange with another agent. We're going to need new forms of payments and those Payment systems are rather, the Internet financial system is perfectly placed to accommodate these new forms of money exchange. So we think, look, the growth of the Internet financial system over the next few years is going to be, let's just say hyperbolic growth broadly. And we think Circle is very well placed.
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A
I mean, that's fascinating. And yeah, I mean a lot of it is like so overwhelming when you think about it. It's like, okay, yeah, like we're having, we're seeing these agents do all these things for people and maybe that's just going to be how life is in five years, 10 years. And there's going to have to be some sort of financial infrastructure that powers that. So maybe. And so I can see where Circle is positioning themselves. Really, really fantastic. Jeremy, I learned a lot from this conversation.
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C
Really.
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A
You know, again, congrats on the, the crazy 12 plus months that you guys have, you guys have had and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the next 12, 24, 36 months is. We'll have to have you back on soon to kind of, you know, get a, get an update on the state of the stablecoin space and what kind of activity these agentic AIs have been doing on Circle. And so I'm really looking, I'll be keeping an eye on it and hopefully we'll get, get a chance to talk to you soon in the near future.
- [23:17]
B
Yeah, thank you. Look, it's been a big year for us building the Internet financial system. What I really want to leave your readers, your readers with is we're just getting going. We view ourselves as an early stage company still and sort of the story we just talked about is one where the Internet is coming for financial services and those are the biggest markets the world has ever seen. So we're just getting going and I'd love to come back and we can catch up on where we've gotten to and where this world has gone at some stage in the future. So thank you so much for having me.
- [23:45]
A
Totally, Jeremy. We'll have to schedule a follow up soon and I'm really looking forward to it. Well, all right, guys, hope you enjoyed that conversation with Jeremy Fox Gein. Jeremy clearly believes that stablecoin coins are becoming a foundational layer for how money moves on the Internet and that Circle is building the rails to facilitate that. I'm not gonna lie, it got me pretty hyped about stablecoins. Now one thing that I didn't get to dig into with Jeremy was some of the concerns regarding Circle's business model. See Right now, most of Circle's revenue comes from parking USDC reserves in Treasuries and earning interest on that. It's a great business model, especially when rates are high. But if the Fed starts cutting rates soon, their revenues could take a hit. But you know, I think that Circle recognizes that and they're trying to diversify the revenue away from just being reliant on interest and essentially becoming a critical plumbing of moving money on the Internet. So we'll have to get Jeremy back on in a few months to dive into their business model. Let me know what you guys thought about today's conversation and how you feel about stablecoins, especially if you're a stablecoin hater, because I feel like there aren't that many haters out there. If you are though, definitely let me know on Spotify and YouTube. YouTube. Also, if you guys have been enjoying this podcast and have like 5 extra seconds, consider giving us a 5 star rating on Apple Spotify. Wherever you listen to your podcast, all that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys again for listening, watching and commenting. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.
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C
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B
Experian.