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

0:01Yetis, buckle up your blockchain and hold on to your digital wallet. Because today's interview is a deep dive into the only part of crypto designed to do something, not just sit in your account. That's right, we're hanging out with Jeremy Allaire, the philosopher, founder, and CEO of Circle. No joke about the philosopher, this dude studied Nietzsche before revolutionizing the U.S. dollar. And now he's leading a financial revolution, but with the boringest crypto of all, the stablecoin. Jeremy's baby is Circle, a company. Circle's baby is USDC, the US dollar coin. And his company Circle IPO'd last year and rose 250 % in its first two days on the stock market.

0:41Today, Circle is worth$14 billion. That's two lifts. And now Circle is handling eight times more transactions than Visa does. Because he didn't chase volatility, he chased stability. Circle doesn't sell memes, they sell plumbing. And today, Jeremy will tell us why Bitcoin is your crazy cousin, but stable coins are your smart uncle. If there's a Mount Rushmore of crypto, Jeremy's on it. And he's the only one on that mountain who has not been sued. Besties, please welcome the bard of blockchains, the Confucius of currency. The Darwin of digital dollars, Jeremy Allaire is the founder and CEO of Circle.

1:15And today's interview with Jeremy is the best one yet. Jeremy, fantastic to have you with us from the World Trade Center in New York City. How are 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. We need more people in the trades. Yeah. 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. What the heck is going on with crypto right now? 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.

1:58The 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 like Microsoft, let alone Bitcoin. And the kind of on again, off again, you know, is the economy being destroyed? Is the economy going to be supercharged? Or, you know, 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.

2:39And then you have the de-dollarization, i.e. sell America, the gold trade, you know, kind of all bets are off. Yeah, we'll be at a million dollars 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? 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 Visionaries Wikipedia page is that moment with the Apple II. Why was getting a computer?

3:11Why was getting that computer so transformative for the future of your life and changing an industry? Yeah, it's really interesting. So it was like 1982, 1983 was the time frame. 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, you know, there was the Radio Shack. We had, you know, periodically would buy like Byte Magazine, which was like the, you know, the early magazine about like 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, you know, this was like the Gutenberg Press, right?

4:01It 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 lure 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.

4:43But I think that was definitely the spider bite or whatever you want to call it. 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 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.

5:16It 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. 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.

5:52You pursue the stable coin. So Jack and I have been wondering, what the heck really is a stablecoin? 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? Well, so actually, I like that one. I'll try some other stuff. But before 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?

6:30Like Netflix is over-the-top. It's like over-the-top television. It goes over the top of the internet. You don't need the old physical infrastructure, but anyway. Don't need to pay$10 a month to Verizon for like the cable box. 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 use them.

7:08And 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 going to be what everyone wants. And you can debate that. I don't want to debate that. But the reality is, at least for the next decades, fiat money, which is sort of government obligation money, let's just call it.

7:47A regular, everyday dollar bills. Dollars that have the full faith 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 when we 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.

8:36And 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.

9:16And 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 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. So what the MP3 did for a Coldplay song and for the entire streaming and music industry, you think can be done for the entire financial industry? I think, yeah. Yeah, Nick, let me try to update our Netflix analogy. Yeah, please, Jack. Stablecoins are streaming, but it's like a streaming episode of Seinfeld.

9:58Seinfeld existed before stablecoins. It was just on cable TV. So I think 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. Yeah. 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.

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12:48That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash T-B-O-Y. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Jeremy, why are stable coins necessary? So, U.S. dollar coin is a blockchain digitized version of the dollar. What's wrong with the regular dollar? I mean, a couple of 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.

13:33And 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.

14:22And it just works. As a person, I want the same capability with the economic systems. 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. Yes. 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.

15:04And 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 like, that's provably a better experience for people. And that's why when, you know, when people start using USDC and they start moving around, they're like, oh my God, I cannot believe, like, I can't believe I'm doing this. You know, 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?

15:35I can't believe we still write physical checks in the United States, which take days to clear. I can't believe I got to pay Venmo in order to get Jack cash ASAP because I lost a Super Bowl bet with him. 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. 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? Yeah, I mean, look, there are technologies and industries that have evolved that are highly regulated.

16:11So 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 taken a really long time to get self-driving cars to be allowed as a sort of simple example. But, you know, these industries that have a lot of friction in them tend to be 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, you know, highly regulated, have a lot of kind of restrictions on what they've been able to do.

16:52And 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, you know, 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. It's technology from the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, et cetera. And it's 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.

17:26Get 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 ability to transform. And that's what's happening. 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. 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.

18:02And so it's happening already in a really meaningful scale. But Jack, I want to ask one follow-up to that. Because Jeremy, Jack and I, before we started our media company, and yeah, 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 like maybe slow is sometimes good. And I'm thinking from like the protection standpoint, like 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. Is that a purposeful reason for why our system is so archaic looking and so slow right now?

18:42Like, is there a benefit to that that we may miss if we start from scratch? Look, I think risk is real and we have systems, you know, 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 like 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.

19:21And 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 like know who you are, you have to 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, like, you're going to get investigated. The controls that are part of what I consider like the social contract between financial intermediaries and society, those are important. But I think actually we can improve them.

19:57Yeah, you're basically a financial infrastructure company too. We are, yes. We are. 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. And, you know, Jeremy, Nick and I, whenever we hear about a digital innovation, we know that there's an underlying physical thing somewhere. Yeah. And for Circle, the underlying physical thing is a U.S. dollar being held somewhere.

20:29Do you have a vault with massive stacks of dollar bills? I do have a funny story on this. Yeah, Jeremy, I'd love to know how many USDC are out there and how many US dollars do you have in your vault? And where do you keep it and what's the code? So the nice thing about USDC is, first of all, like you can see the amount that's in circulation in real time at all times. And so, you know, like I can tell you right now, like looking at CoinMarketCap, it's pulling. There's 73.19 billion USDC in circulation right now. Blue Air Blue Signature Purifiers remove airborne pollutants so you can recover and sleep better.

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21:53Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash acast. Rules and restrictions may apply. 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 global systemically important banks, and we can hold some in cash with like the largest custody banks in the world, like a bank in Eric Mellon. And so that's really what USDC is.

22:35And 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 QSIP, 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. I was 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.

23:06Like, well, like, what is it? Like, is it like what kind of like infrastructure? Like, what is it? And 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 the dollar is Oracle databases with like Sun microsystems, many computers that are in distributed clusters. And, you know, like that's it. So it's - That's our whole financial system. The dollar is like an Oracle database, you know, sitting out there. And I used to joke, you know, like quantitative easing, which is like the Fed pumping money into that is like a - Yeah. If you know, like it's like a SQL insert statement, like insert new record.

23:43And Jeremy, you know, what percent are you holding in cash? Because that's the only part of your reserves that isn't making money, 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, etc. 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 like developer infrastructure to blockchain infrastructure, whether you're a bank or you're a startup or everything in between to like if you want to build on the internet financial system, we give you the stack.

24:27We give you the digital wallet tools, the infrastructure tools, the actual digital currency, everything that's needed to kind of build and operate a financial application on the internet built on this kind of stack. 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 stable coin, ever not be$1? And also, at the same time, circle the company, you know, the stock is down since its IPO. It surged on the IPO. It's down right now. How can the company operate so differently and the stock act so differently from the underlying cryptocurrency that you run, which is based on the US dollar?

25:09Well, I mean, there are a couple of things. So one is just circle the 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. And so there's a lot of different views on this. One view is, you know, if you take sort of Secretary of Treasury Besant, who will sort of say, hey, I think that this innovation of digital dollars in the form of stable coins are going to keep growing.

25:45They're going to be exported all around the world. People are going to want to use these. This is a powerful way for the U.S. to compete in dollars in the future. that, you know, 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, two, three, four 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 grow with it. And so you've got kind of CAGRs over, say, forward periods, you know, people ranging from, you know, 25 % CAGRs to 60 % CAGRs.

26:23And that growth is a backdrop that we're building into. It's the sort of this new utility for money on the internet. And we're growing into that. 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 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. Yes. We used to say like, we're like the boringest, we're the boringest thing. It's like, it's always a dollar. Why is it always a dollar, man?

26:52You're a very stable CEO for a stable coin company. So can a dollar coin, a stable coin like that ever not be worth$1? 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 like tons of places are regulating us. We are required that redemption right is a core premise. And that's why the structure is set up so that it's always redeemable.

27:34Meaning, like, 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 like 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.

28:07Yeah. Hey, Jeremy, if your five - and 10-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 huge tax on so much spending that happens in this economy. Are people flocking to Circle to avoid credit card fees? 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.

28:51Meaning, right now, there are, you've probably seen this proliferation of AI agents that are flying around. There's protocols for AI agents now to pay each other directly in USDC and on blockchains, and that's happening. and there's actually a USDC hackathon running right now, run by AI agents. They're running hackathon, and they're making the choices on it, and we chipped in 30 ,000 USDC as prize money. So you have everything from 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.

29:43And then the USDC was actually the proceeds that went to the issuer of the bond. And so everything from, you know, you're not gonna do that with a credit card, obviously. So Jeremy, do you and Jamie Dimon talk? 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, like all this kind of stuff. Yeah, so I think like the traditional intermediaries on transactions, whether it's like, you know, buying a cup of coffee, the proverbial thing, or buying a product online, or, you know, paying the street vendor, whatever that is, those retail transactions will benefit from this.

30:20And 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. Okay, 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, 50 basis points to USDC. It saves them money. 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, like Visa is going to have their digital version that's running on stable points and stuff as well.

31:17And so I think like 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 &L? That we don't know, but we do know the changes are going to happen. So Jack, we always end the story by whipping up the takeaway. Shall we have Jeremy do it for us? Yes, Jeremy, what's your takeaway on Stablecoin's USDC Circle? 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, that those sets of changes and the scale of those changes are going to happen in the financial system.

32:01Circle 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 build that up. Basically, a takeaway in your takeaway, the plumbing can be sexy.

32:39So Jeremy, before we let you go, though, some rapid fire questions. What is the best brand in crypto that isn't Circle? 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 give them a shout out. What's the best business book you've ever read? Oh, man. I have a dirty little secret. I don't read a lot of business books. All right. Best book you've ever read? The best book I've ever read, it was probably like, I think you were saying I read Nietzsche, but maybe it was The Plague by Albert Camus or something like that.

33:23Best business leader you admire. I admire Tim Cook. And finally, Jeremy. Best restaurant in New York City where you're based. Oh, come on. Yeah, you know, I order takeout from Dig. Big fans of Dig, great lunch bowl. And if you, Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, were a stock, what would be your three or four letter stock ticker symbol? No, you could just use my initials, JDA. Jeremy, stable coins, 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.

34:05Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you, guys. A lot of fun.

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