Circle CEO: The Entire Financial System Is Coming Onchain (We’re Still Early)

Andy (0:00)

Jeremy, welcome to the show, Jeremy. This is your show, this is your world.

Congratulations.

Jeremy Allaire (0:08)

Thank you, man.

Andy (0:08)

Absolutely.

Robbie (0:09)

What a day, Jeremy, what a day. I mean, look, you started off your talk at the top in the keynote, and you just spoke about this reality that we're entering, which is just this new economy, and specifically about this bifurcated economy, or perhaps that's the way that it's been talked about. But you stated this economy is not going to be a split economy, it's going to be on chain, it's going to be on Arc. Talk to us about your vision here for Arc, the agentic economy, and what's really happening here.

Jeremy Allaire (0:39)

Yeah, I mean, it's stuff we've been thinking about in some ways for a very long time. Like what got me into this whole space 13 years ago was the idea that these networks were going to be computers, and that you're going to be able to put software machines on these computers. If you could actually put real assets like dollars, obviously, and contracts, that you could actually construct a software powered economy.

The founding vision was just like there's software powered communications, commerce media on the Internet, like a software powered economic system would be possible. In many ways, we've been pulling that thread and working on different pieces. I think Arc is in many ways, like it's the full manifestation of that founding vision. Like we're creating an operating system, it's a network operating system, its purpose is to run the full slate of economic activity, not just moving money around, but actually the contracts that run the economy, the decisions that have to be made, the governance mechanism, all these mechanisms that we think about as like the building blocks of a firm or an economy can come online. But then it's this convergence of these other operating systems, probably the most powerful operating systems ever created ever, which is intelligence operating systems, which are extraordinary and they need each other. So I think our idea is like the agentic economy is these two different operating systems and they're basically two sides of the same coin. The agentic system is these intelligence systems and the economic operating systems like Arc As A New provide the trust and verifiability and the actual execution environment for the economic stuff.

In a world of proliferating agents, where agents can do things not just for us as individuals, but actually we reconstruct what a firm even is. We reconstruct the firm as these orchestrations of agents doing work. The corporations we create are governed on chain, and you get this incredible proliferation of output that's possible from that. And so I think it's the most exciting thing, and Chris Dixon and I were talking about it too, which is like there's going to be these new types of corporations that people, obviously, but a lot of it is going to be AI and they need this layer, and we're building for that. And I think I genuinely believe, it's not just that developers have AI tools to build stuff faster, it's that actually what they're putting out there are AI agents themselves.

Andy (3:24)

I think you're describing an intelligent economy, and broadly, this is an intelligence revolution, and you're describing that it is applicable to not only the economy, every company is going to implement this, and we are going to see the collective ultimately create this step function, which I think Arc is exemplary of. It is a step function increase in blockchains, and I think Andy and I were talking about this before you joined here, which is that you had the benefit of hindsight. There's been so many blockchains that have come before, all of that is a learning moment, and now Arc has been able to leapfrog, very similar to the way AI models leapfrog one another. You've been able to leapfrog all of the blockchains that have come before, and I truly feel that Arc is a next-generation blockchain.

Jeremy Allaire (4:09)

I really hope so, and I think, I use the analogy of mobile. There was 15 years of people building mobile, including massive companies, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, all these guys all around the world, the Palm Pilot, the BlackBerry, and everyone thought they had mobile. Everyone's like, oh, I've got mobile, I've got apps, I can do this stuff, but it hadn't really actualized, and then it was like the breakthrough of Android and iOS, like these new operating systems. These new operating systems created the surface area, created the user experience, created the developer experience. Enough things converge at the right time that they could pull together, but then they created an environment where people could create incredible new things. And that's how I think about what we're doing with Arc. I really genuinely do. I think this is an amazing environment for people who want to create and build. And we really feel like we did have a benefit of hindsight.