#34 - Sean Neville

Balaji (0:00)

All right, Sean, welcome to The Network State Podcast. Glad to have you here.

Sean Neville (0:04)

Great to be here, thanks.

Balaji (0:05)

So we worked together several years ago on what became USDC. And I was the lead on the Coinbase side, and we set up the Centre Consortium, and you and Jeremy were the co-founders of Circle. And I think the Circle Coinbase Centre partnership has been pretty impressive for the world over the last seven, eight years. Do you want to talk about that? Can I just introduce people? Because you're a co-founder of Circle, you've done a bunch of other things.

Give the quick spiel, Sean on Sean.

Sean Neville (0:34)

Yeah, so Jeremy and I started Circle in 2013 So it's been 12 years, which is like 120 years in crypto or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and so we were just obsessed with this idea about democratizing and sort of decentralizing global finance and sort of had this vision for what that might look like.

And the vision really hasn't wavered. The way that we've tried to execute on the vision, obviously, has had a lot of different sort of crisscrossing paths and probably should have been obvious in 2013 that we needed something like a stablecoin. But it was actually 2017 when we figured out that that's what we needed to that's what we needed in order to build everything else we were interested in. And obviously, I was going to say, obviously, you know, that part of the story is as you came into the picture and helped make it happen as well.

Balaji (1:25)

Yeah, and I think, basically, what was funny about that was that was, I think that was true teamwork. And what was interesting about stablecoins at the time, as you may remember, is a lot of people pooh-poohed them and said, wow, your great innovation is putting a dollar on chain. That's a great innovation, right? And it was kind of like people not understanding how big a deal it was to put, like, for example, news on online, right? Or, you know, they just didn't understand that, for example, once it's on chain, you've got programmability and you've got, you know, anybody can send anybody and you can use it in smart contracts and you can slice and dice it down to smaller amounts and you can have devices, use it in machine payments, as we'll get to with your new startup with Catena. And people didn't understand that stuff at the time, but I think we saw that. And, you know, what were you thinking about? You said the vision had changed for stables over time, but what was the number one thing that you guys were thinking about at the time you started work on USDC?

Sean Neville (2:27)

Yeah, I mean, it was pretty simple, honestly. In order to enable global payments that didn't posit borders and that were almost free, we needed some representation that was stable and capable of moving over internet rails. So the idea was multiple chains, not to be religious about any one particular chain or piece of infrastructure, but to rely on blockchains to deliver value. And that in itself was really a building block, so that we can enable these other use cases. I say today stable coins, largely the use case has been in crypto capital markets. We haven't yet seen that unlock of payments, treasury management, effects, these other things, but we're right on the cusp of it now. And we certainly needed that building block technically, but also it couldn't just be a circle coin or a Coinbase coin.

Balaji (3:15)

That's right, USDC, if you recall, I think we named it so that the C was circle and Coinbase and Centre, because the Centre Consortium, the Consortium meant it was decentralized because we were partners on it, and it also meant that others could in theory join.

Sean Neville (3:30)

That's right. And that was the idea. We expected there to be potentially multiple issuers, all of whom participated in the Consortium, even though they may be competing at other layers of the stack.

The idea is just interoperable standards, right? So back in the day, Microsoft had a slightly different version of HTTP than Netscape. I actually didn't know that.

Balaji (3:53)

That's interesting.

Sean Neville (3:54)

Well, it was sort of like Build Your Service that ran in IE.

Balaji (4:01)

You mean like Blink Tags versus Marquee, like HTML?

Sean Neville (4:04)

That kind of thing, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But ultimately, everybody agreed, let's just agree on a standard and let's not argue over different implementations or say SSL, because we can compete at the e-commerce layer so long as we have this foundation of interoperable standards that no one vendor really owns. And when it comes to delivering dollars or other currencies, but stable coins today, people largely want dollars. Today is what they mean when they say stables. It can't be Circle dollars or Stripe dollars.