Heath Tarbert, Circle President | From Crypto Winter to IPO | Stablecoins, AI and the Future of Money

**Heath Tarbert** (0:05)
It can be as big as the economy allows it to be. The sky is the limit.

**Lloyd Wahed** (0:10)
The company starts becoming potentially generational.

**Heath Tarbert** (0:13)
The fact that people are coming out and saying, we want to build a stable coin, validates our thesis. The pie is only getting bigger.

**Lloyd Wahed** (0:20)
The big swing there is, as you say, if it were to be used as collateral in traditional finance.

**Heath Tarbert** (0:26)
We've been able to get more products out the door in the last six months than probably in the last six years. We are going to be an AI-driven organization. One day, you're going to have a headline. Blockchain is king, as overtaken traditional finance.
We have to win today, but we're only going to win in the long run by thinking about tomorrow.

**Lloyd Wahed** (0:59)
Heath, welcome on to the Searching for Mana show.

**Heath Tarbert** (1:01)
Great to be here, Lloyd. Thank you so much.

**Lloyd Wahed** (1:04)
Absolute pleasure. So excited to have this wide-ranging conversation with you, just to set the scene for anybody in the audience who doesn't know. Heath, Heath is the president at Circle, and we are excited to have you on almost two years to the day that we had your colleague Jeremy on in 2000

**Heath Tarbert** (1:34)
My boss.

**Lloyd Wahed** (1:39)
Does it work like that if you're the president?

**Heath Tarbert** (1:41)
Yeah, he's the CEO.

**Lloyd Wahed** (1:41)
Other way around.

**Heath Tarbert** (1:42)
He's the chairman and CEO, not very much so.

**Lloyd Wahed** (1:46)
So Jeremy was on 2024, middle of the year, and then a year on. From then, 2025, we had the IPO, that we will critique thoroughly.

**Heath Tarbert** (2:00)
Okay.

**Lloyd Wahed** (2:01)
Which is a year on today, and it feels like a nice time to pick the conversation back up with you, and take the chance to review what has come before, and then also really look into what's happening right now. It feels like a very important time in financial technologies history, and couldn't think of anyone better to have that conversation with in you. So, to start with, if you could be so kind to anybody in the audience who wants to know more, or doesn't know who you are, Heath, and what you're doing, just to allay more than my introduction, if you could take it away, please.

**Heath Tarbert** (2:38)
Sure. So, I'm president of Circle. Of course, Circle is a leading global financial technology and infrastructure firm. We're known first and foremost, I think, for USDC, which is the world's leading regulated stable coin. It's used in more stable coin transactions than any other stable coin in the world.
But we're also building infrastructure, like our layer one enterprise blockchain, which is called ARK, and we can talk a little bit about that. We're also laying the groundwork for agent e-commerce. So at the company, I oversee risk, compliance, legal, all of the operational functions, IT security, as well as communications, with governments, and play an external and an internal role. But my main job, as I would say it, is Jeremy is a brilliant visionary. That's very clear. My job is to help him turn that vision into a reality.

**Lloyd Wahed** (3:34)
Thank you.
What immediately comes across is the red thread, perhaps, that I'm curious about at the moment, and many of the interviews are searching for, which is, we feel like we're in a moment in the market where phenomenal, revolutionary almost infrastructure has been bought online. And when I was talking to Jeremy, he said a few things that I think are great quotes, but certainly one, was you can just go back through the history to double edger accounting, the digitalization of the internet, and then we're at this moment where we can have value exchange digitally. And what really took me by surprise in a positive way, was how Jeremy, to your point, was thinking on such a grand scale, not that there's anything wrong with it, but a lot of people will look at, okay, there's a trend, I can make a really impressive company into this trend. Stablecoins has been one of the massive user cases of digital assets. Whilst I wasn't really thinking in those times, just thinking on a much grander societal level and how this can be a technology platform to move value around broadly. So to immediately hear where you are and where you're thinking now, which is for the next massive trend that's coming through, which is a gigantic commerce and having ARC there, really makes me think that the vision that Jeremy saw is coming together. Just to start with, let's go the other way around. How big can this company be?