that we delegate and orchestrate. Agents that research, negotiate, write code and reconcile books. The work of the firm is itself decomposing into tasks and those tasks are being taken up by machines.
This past July, I published a treatise called the agentic economy and its central claim is one that I want to repeat here. Because ARC is its ultimate embodiment. The agentic economy and the onchain economy are not two different revolutions. They are the same economy seen from different sides. Seen from two different sides.
Over the past 30 years, we built a planetary nervous system for information, the internet. What we never built was its counterpart, a native circulatory system of value. Money and contracts stayed trapped in batch files, banking hours, legacy closed networks, and mountains of offline paper process and bureaucracy.
Humans have tolerated this world. We waited two days for settlement. We accepted that money sleeps on weekends. We waited on contracts to settle and enforce in weeks or months. But machines will not tolerate this.
When intelligence becomes abundant, when billions and then hundreds of billions of AI agents are performing economic work, the velocity of money doesn't rise incrementally. It rises by multiple orders of magnitude. An agent that completes a task in 400 milliseconds cannot wait two business days to get paid. An agent coordinating a complex financial contract across borders with another agent can't wait.
And in global finance, certainty matters just as much as speed. A machine can't call the back office when an agent transacts. Final has to mean final cryptographically, instantly, unconditionally. And the cost of using financial infrastructure should never be the most unpredictable part of the transaction.
That is programmable money. Money that is a native object of software. Money that carries logic, identity, and conditions. Money that settles with certainty in under a second for a fraction of a cent 24 hours a day, anywhere on Earth.
The agentic economy has created a new massive demand shock for programmable money. Already this year, thousands of paid agent services have come online and the overwhelming majority of agent-to-agent payment volume is flowing over the X42 standard using USDC. The machines have already chosen their money. What they've been waiting for is their economic operating system.
I want to step back for a moment because a lot of us here have been in this industry for a long time. Let's all just take a moment and think about the era we are leaving behind. For 15 years, crypto fought for attention. It was loud. It was speculative. It was spectacle. The spectacle era of crypto is over. Spectacle era of crypto is over.
The most important technologies in history disappear into the background. Nobody thinks about TCP IP when they search the internet. Nobody thinks about the grid when they flip a switch. And that's what's happening right now. Crypto is becoming invisible infrastructure. And increasingly, its heaviest users won't be people at all. There'll be machines talking to machines, agents paying agents, trillions of transactions where no human ever sees a wallet or a hash. That's happening now.
And this invisible infrastructure is being adopted and encapsulated by two killer apps of crypto. Tokenization. All of the world's assets and contracts are moving on chain. Because a tokenized asset or contract is better, instant, global, programmable, composable, always on. Tokenized assets and contracts are growing exponentially and opening up to the world.
And stable coins, digital dollars that have become the internet's monetary base layer with the Genius Act and regulatory frameworks breaking out all around the world and coming into force and USDC just crossing over a hundred trillion dollars in transaction volume this past year.
Tokenized dollars, tokenized assets, autonomous intelligence, three exponential curves, all converging at once. Every one of them needs a place to run. A network with the trust of a financial market utility and the openness of the internet. That place is ARC.
Today, we're going to be taking you through everything that is launching with ARC mainnet. The institutions running the network, the hundreds of partners already integrated, the developer platforms to accelerate building, and new breakthroughs coming to Arc that we've never showcased before.
The foundation of ARC are the institutions who stand behind it. Look at our founding validator cohort. BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered, Galaxy, Global Payments, Money, SBI Group, Sumitomo. These are the institutions that clear the world's securities, run the world's payment networks, and manage the world's assets. And they're not just building on this network.
The companies that depend on the integrity of this infrastructure are the companies securing and operating it. That has never been true of any blockchain and has rarely been true of any financial infrastructure in history. Global companies must be able to trust the network they're running their business on.
And ARC was designed with the truth that open networks have avoided for too long. An open network does not mean that every transaction must share every detail. Real finance needs room for private information that should not be open to everyone. Payroll, treasury, deal flow with compliance built in, not bolted on. You'll see what that means later this afternoon.
ARC is built on a simple premise. The global economic system deserves a blockchain it can trust. Today, that trust is live.
One more thing before I hand it over. Every lasting network eventually has to answer a deeper question. How will its participants coordinate? How do the institutions securing the network, the builders creating on the network, and the users depending on the network align around its long-term future?
This week, we took a foundational step towards that answer. Circle completed the genesis mint of ARC, the full initial supply of 10 billion tokens, making Circle the first publicly traded company to mint a network token.
ARC token is not available today and it is planned to become available upon ARC's transition to proof of stake in 2027 with all network fees remaining payable in USDC.
PC operating systems gave us the software industry. The web gave us the information economy. Mobile platforms gave us the app economy. And AI foundation models have given us intelligence on demand. Today, the internet gets its economic operating system. Arc is launched. So, let's begin the show. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Circle Chief Product and Technology Officer Nikhil Chandhok.
Very happy to be here. I'm Nikhil, leader of the node squad here at Circle. So here to talk about ARC. We're very excited to be launching it today. Jeremy mentioned an economic OS. There have been many, many great operating systems in the last 25 years. I've had the fortune of working on a few of them and the best operating systems were the ones that were successful at building an ecosystem, right? They were most successful when they brought others along. They were very successful when they solved problems and their ability to solve problems came from years of experience of trying to solve that problem.
So we're building an economic OS and we're building it like a platform which means that it's not just launching the layer 1 blockchain. It also means launching all the apps and services that go along with that to make that blockchain successful which is different from how other blockchains have been launched in the past. And so I'm here to talk about it. So our ARC network itself is, we'll talk a little more detail about it in terms of the technical innovation there but we have a set of global validators who people know who are involved in building financial infrastructure in the world today and they're moving into this new world along with us to build this new future that we are imagining.
Stable coins and assets like Circle itself, Jeremy mentioned this, has settled over 100 trillion in USDC volume. We've settled that 100 trillion in USDC volume over public chains over more than 8 years of USDC's existence. And we're bringing all of that expertise, all of that compliance expertise, we're bringing all of that safety expertise, we're bringing the performance expertise, that network expertise, all of that is coming to ARC. So we know how to make this successful. We're going to bring all of that expertise to ARC.
Next is our interop stack. So like I said we have CCTP and Gateway. These are existing products today. These connect more than 30 chains. They make it possible for you to spend USDC. You can spend a millionth of a USDC if you wanted to. All of that infrastructure is coming to ARC and we're making sure that if you have an asset on ARC, you can actually move it anywhere in the world on any chain very simply in less than a second.
Then we get into the developer experience. We are innovating there as well. We'll talk more about ARC Studio and App Kits which make it possible for developers to simply ship complex financial applications which was not possible in blockchains in the past. And then we'll talk some more about our portal. The main thing is we want to make sure that as developers, as users, as business owners, as enterprises who come to this platform, they don't view ARC just as an L1 network layer, but view it as this comprehensive set of tooling that makes it possible for them to accomplish their business goals.
Okay. So, what makes ARC different? So, we'll start from the top. Gas and digital dollars. Gas is a complicated concept. I think most people in the world who are not involved with crypto don't understand gas. Gas has to be accounted for. You need it in your wallet when you're making a transaction. And if you believe there's going to be millions and millions of agents that are going to get instantiated and they're all going to be economic participants, they're all going to need to be onboarded not just into stable coins but also into gas tokens. ARC takes that away. ARC says if you have stable coins you can pay gas with stable coins you can settle transactions very simply with USDC.
The next most important thing is finality. Finality means that a transaction that happened it's not going to change it's not going to get reorganized it's not going to go back and if you have huge dependency trees on transactions by millions of economic actors that are ephemeral and they disappear we cannot have rollbacks we cannot have transaction sets that are not reliable. So we are able to accomplish that on ARC within less than a second and for really, really cheap.
The third is privacy. So we'll talk more throughout the day about privacy. By default all transactions on ARC are public. We have worked both on the user experience and the compliance necessities of enabling a good privacy primitive on ARC and it is as simple as turning on a toggle and having a private transaction and you can shield not just who you're transacting with but you can also shield things like smart contracts that you're transacting with behind the privacy token.
Assets and interop. All Circle assets are issued on ARC. USDC, USYC, EURC are issued on ARC and then we have a whole gamut of partner stable coins and real world assets that are coming to ARC as well.
Agent ready. We are treating agents as first class actors on ARC. They get onboarded into USDC. They can spawn other agents. They can give them USDC. These agents can actually use Circle agent stack to do complicated research work. They can make phone calls. There's all kinds of new primitives that are being showcased in the Circle agent stack marketplace and all of those agents we imagine to live on ARC and they will start creating a work history on what it is that they're able to do and they're able to convince the other agents that they're good agents because they have all of this amazing work history.
Last thing is post-quantum resilience. I mentioned we've done a hundred trillion dollars worth of volume on USDC. We care deeply about security. We care deeply about compliance. We want to make sure that your transactions that you make on ARC are secure forever. Post-quantum security starting day one gives us that.
So another thing I really believe is that for any new platform to succeed, you need a great developer experience. Developers are the ones who create value on the platform. And for ARC that means for us it starts from being fully EVM compatible. So what is EVM compatibility? Just making sure that you're compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine. And so developers who've been working on Ethereum for close to 10 years can bring all of that experience, all of that tooling, all of those contracts to ARC without having to learn anything new. So we believe that is critical to being able to bootstrap this new economic operating system.
Other things that we're doing to improve the developer experience, we have ARC Studio. So people may have heard of coding agents. Now with ARC Studio with coding agents you can start deploying smart contracts on ARC. The smart contracts you don't have to learn Solidity if you don't want to learn Solidity you can start talking to your agent in English you can come up with a complex financial application and from within your agent you can go deploy it on ARC and start transacting on ARC. So that's our Studio.
App Kit takes something that is very typical on blockchains things like primitives like own, borrow, swap and packages that all up and on-ramping and packages all of that up into simple SDKs that developers can start using to start bootstrapping their applications on ARC very, very simply. So we'll keep adding more over here. So the point being it's not just an alone blockchain it is an entire platform. So if you are building financial applications today you should be able to use ARC to solve all manners of problems not just layer one problems.
So we've been in test net for close to a year. We've had 100 plus applications on ARC. They are all launching on ARC today. These applications over the last one year have done over 700 million transactions and the network is stable.
So who are these folks who are launching on ARC today? Well, we have institutions and these institutions bring trust and liquidity. They bring in this is where we believe a lot of the growth is going to come from. We believe business institutions have been waiting for a platform like ARC to bring their assets onto ARC so that they can interact with the world and with each other in a compliant secure way.
Developers bring innovation. Developers are key to forming the community. We call them architects here at ARC and they're helping us build at global scale right now by bringing not starting with financial applications but eventually bringing all manners of applications that require some sort of financial instrument to make the application function.
And lastly we've talked about agents. Agents will bring velocity. Agents will transact autonomously. They will build work histories. They will have a way of showing their work. And so all of this together is going to operate on the same substrate 24/7 365.
So as before before I end I'd like to spend a few minutes on the various use cases. And this is always the favorite question being like what is your chain focused on? And the way I answer that question is what is the internet focused on? And it's all of it, right? Like you want to make sure that your internet is able to take your most important financial transactions. You want to be able to watch videos on the internet. You want to be able to watch memes on internet. You want to do all of it. And so I don't think ARC is designed as this general purpose platform. But we still have these use cases that have come forward over the last year of being in test net.
Payments being one. I think payments operate 24/7 365 with all the new partner stable coins that we're bringing on board payments you get even more successful. Trading, I think this is where assets discover their price people are able to hedge risk and this is one of the first core use cases of blockchains and it really shines on ARC because of things like sub-second finality and such.
Lending markets. If you have an asset, you want to make it productive, we have markets to be able to do that. Crypto assets, real world assets, all of those assets being used as collateral so that you can have a good liquidity on these lending markets.
FX. So on the back of the partner stable coins that we have launched and the Circle stable coins these markets we are hoping to make these markets deep and wide all across the world.
And asset issuance. Asset issuance is really important. It's not just important to have the crypto assets on chain but also to bring in the real world assets and make sure that they have as good an experience as crypto assets have right now.
So networks are more than technology. We really need believers to get on ARC. We need people who want to build the future to be part of ARC and that work starts today. So, I want to welcome everybody to ARC. And I look forward to building with all of you. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Circle Chief Commercial Officer Kash Rosagi, BlackRock's Global Head of Digital Assets Robert Mitchnik, Aave Labs Founder and CEO Stani Kulechov, and DTCC Head of Strategy and Market Solutions Michael Winnicki.
I think I've got to do it. Let's go. Let's go. Come on. Let's go.
Thank you all. What I find remarkable about this stage right now is Robbie's firm manages more money than anyone in the world. Stan's firm has built the world's largest open lending market. Michael's firm manages and clears more securities than anyone in the world. All three of them have been thinking about this future where finance is able to run on internet native rails for a very, very long time. And today all three of them are on ARC. Two of them are actually helping operate ARC. And so it's a real pleasure to be here today to talk to them about the future, what they're excited about, and specifically why they chose ARC as a network to build on.
So I actually want to start from an infrastructure perspective. All of you have been thinking about market infrastructure in the form of tokenization and tokenized assets for a very long time. We don't need to argue over how big it can get. It can get very big. It brings in new participants and it can extend existing use cases. I'd love to understand though, what are you most excited about today that perhaps wasn't even possible not even a year ago or two years ago? What are you guys focused on and what are your customers focused on? Why don't you start, Robbie?
Sure. Well, first off, congrats to the whole Circle team. I think this is an incredibly exciting day and we're very happy to be part of it. Obviously we've been a close partner of you guys for a long time and this is I think just the latest super exciting chapter a big step change new exciting chapter in what you guys are building. So that's amazing.
In terms of how it intersects with tokenization I think it's very substantial. We've leaned in now for a number of years on tokenization. I think that's been well established. We're looking at this across many different asset classes but fundamentally the common thread is it's about access and it's about utility. On the first point, how do we take a broader universe of assets and make those available across the world to more and more investors as they build better portfolios and better holistic opportunities to save and invest. And second is about utility. How does blockchain, how does 24/7 settlement, how does programmability enhance what you can do with an asset by having it in tokenized form? And we talked a lot about things like collateral but interestingly think about with Danny here. What about lending for example and the ability to do that in novel ways in addition to the portability, flexibility and all these advantages that come out. So, that applies across a lot of different asset classes. We started with money market funds, but it's grown pretty quickly now.
That's awesome. Stan, how about you?
I mean, it's quite exciting time and big congrats for the Circle team and Jeremy for everything. It's been a big day and we've been waiting for this moment and I think that's what's sort of exciting about the infrastructure piece is that this is the sort of like a big moment of actually creating a market structure and infrastructure that really reduces a lot of these sort of like friction pieces in finance and improve the cost structure.
So I think that open financial systems done in a very compliant and transparent way with privacy is the future. At the same time, I do believe that one of the key advantages for a lot of this infrastructure that we're building is to enhance the cost structure of finance. And I think that from a perspective we've processed over almost four trillion in deposits, one trillion in borrowing volume with few hundreds lines of code without any sort of a settlement team or big credit team underwriting this business and I think this proves what you can actually do for the whole finance as assets are coming on chain with tokenization and that cost structure then benefits not just the end users but the whole financial system and also brings that access component and I think that's where I'm most excited about.
And then also thinking about the future where we're going from here is that how this big theme of automation is going to work. So obviously automation is about AI but also on chain and I think the future financial businesses will run on automation on chain which is sort of like the right form factor and with AI with agentic.
That's incredible. Michael, the DTCC custody is about 114 trillion in assets that could eventually make its way on chain. What are you focused on right now when you think about tokenization as new infrastructure?
Sure. So you know why tokenization right? And I think both Robbie and Stani mentioned right there's these core capabilities around 24/7 mobility, programmability of assets that can automate capital market workflows and really importantly you know ecosystems right how do we bring together not just the DTC ecosystem but open that up right the ecosystem for cash management, collateral management that makes for a more interoperable ecosystem.
And when we think about these capabilities it really gives rise ultimately to a world that we envision where capital can move faster, it can be optimized and deployed in a more efficient manner, and we can broaden access to US capital markets. And if we can do that through tokenization, we're able to help our clients grow their businesses, also help markets as a whole prosper, right? And so, it's a big ambition. But what's important isn't just tokenization, it's really the how of tokenization. And so we're really excited to anchor this service within the heart of existing capital markets infrastructure in the US. It's really how we can create interoperability across traditional market infrastructure, tokenize and create new capabilities while still not giving up the trusted layer, the resilience, the securities and investor protections that exist that investors and regulators have come to expect.
And so if we can combine that trusted infrastructure layer, new capabilities and unite, you know, traditional and digital ecosystems, we think we have real value that we can help our clients deliver to for the markets together.
So speaking of that trusted infrastructure layer, all three of your firms have massive global scale, massive global influence. When you're thinking about the networks that you want to participate in and build on, I'm sure you have every network knocking on your door. How do you think about that decision-making process? What led you to ultimately decide to come help us build ARC? How about Stan, you start?
I think it has to do a lot with the form factor and I've been building in the onchain world for almost a decade and seeing the whole sort of space move forward and seeing the growth of these native crypto assets. And I think that we're going towards a world where all of these assets are coming on chain and my sort of job is to make these assets as productive as possible. And I think the way they can get productive is by using as a collateral and being able to unlock liquidity lending and borrowing and creating global credit markets and interest rate markets.
But the right form factor for me and seeing how do we take this technology and implement into the more broader financial world is basically having ability to add privacy, being able to have a network run by counterparties and validators that basically you would be a counterparty on an everyday basis. Having a native stable coin settlement that's very important. And then obviously plugging the whole sort of like interface on top of that and I believe that that interface today definitely is broader institutions and people that are working in finance but in the future that's going to be a lot automated and basically agent based and I think this is where Circle is putting a lot of energy at the moment and I think that's where that will be the right approach to take this technology that is technically proven which is not anymore a technical problem but more of like how do you implement that into the real finance.
Right. Well I think in terms of DTCC and BlackRock running a validator and being a validator is a very different kind of commitment than just launching a product on chain. What made you comfortable to feel like right now is the right time to get involved at that level of commitment with ARC? Why don't you start.
Yeah. Well you're right we have launched in tokenized form in the past on a number of different blockchains. But this is the first instance where we've actually taken that step to be a validator. And I think the rationale for us is the way that Circle has designed this just has in my view nailed it from top to bottom in terms of having the exact right future vision around optimizing for stable coin payments clearly optimizing for AI agentic use cases being very quantum forward in the way you're thinking about it.
And so from a design perspective and the differentiated utility that gets unlocked from really being purpose-built for the massive stable coin payments use case we do see differentiation in terms of what ARC is going to be able to do particularly for the use cases that you're building for.
Michael, how about you? DTCC comfortable being a validator?
Oh yeah, we're excited to be a validator and I think there's two answers to the question. You know, one is, you know, our role is operating financial market infrastructure and when we think about what financial market infrastructure looks like in the future, the role of a validator clearly aligns right with the types of rules that we want to deliver resiliency and scale to capital markets. But there's another element which is around the connection to our tokenization service. So if we're going to deploy assets on a network, it's really critical to us that it's at FMI scale and grade. So when it comes to throughput, security, settlement finality, and one of the best ways not just to initially diligence a network, but to have that ongoing diligence and be at the heart of it is by running these validator nodes.
There's, you know, certainly an infrastructure component, but there's really an overlap with how do we deliver trust and scale and when we can be at the heart of the networks that we operate on that really makes a better proposition for our clients.
That's really incredible. What I want to end on is to not forget the symbolism that you're seeing here on the stage today. You have one of the largest and most systemically important companies that has been built on DeFi here with us with two of the most systemically important financial organizations in the world all participating on chain. And one of the things we've been building toward at Circle for the last 10 years is mainstream adoption. What does it mean to be mainstream? All these companies moving on chain. And one of the recurring themes is privacy. Institutions aren't going to completely move on chain until they have some form of privacy. I'm curious how do you all think of privacy now in a world where you are coming on chain? What are the things your clients are asking for that you think will be important before more and more activity comes on chain?
Anyone can jump in.
Sure. Well transparency is a nice feature of blockchains but radical transparency is not a great feature for capital markets and a number of use cases don't really work with perfect transparency in terms of having visibility into who all your counterparties are what your positions are where you post collateral etc. So this is I think it's important to distinguish this is not about anonymity, right? And that's consistent with the way that you all have designed it to be regulatory forward and compliant in terms of selective visibility. This is about confidentiality where it's applicable. So I think it's another really compelling design feature.
Yeah, I think the blockchain world had to start with public transparency in public markets and that's going to be like a big part of it in the future and that is how the sort of technology was able to prove itself and connect different use cases and I think that's have been a great feature and privacy is a layer that enables a lot of new use cases and also it creates the actual execution environment because I think that markets do benefit from the transparency aspect but when it comes to execution balances for example or near counterparty transactions I think that's where the space has been still very nascent and I think ARC has been taking a step further and actually bringing that to as a kind of like an out-of-the-shelf experience for the network participants and I think that is going to give a really great advantage particularly because ARC is built on EVM. So it's EVM compliant meaning that you can easily tap into an existing developer community that is building a lot of these financial primitives and have access to the privacy layer so you can produce a lot of interesting use cases and expand the audiences as well.
Michael, anything important in terms of privacy?
Very much in agreement. You know traditional capital markets the lifeblood of it is transparency but we have rules around trace reporting or when fund positions are disclosed that are very carefully calibrated to balance you know transparency for markets against information leakage that ultimately harms liquidity and from a DTCC perspective we're really thinking about this around giving our clients access to the ecosystems and the features right that they choose and matter for them for their use cases and so there are definitely certain use cases where I think privacy is going to be important in capital markets workflows and we want to give our clients access to the best models that preserve their privacy while still giving us the transparency we need as a good control location for the industry to have the right operator controls as an FMI.
Privacy is an ongoing topic that we've been thinking about and working on at Circle for years now. And I want to give you a glimpse in terms of the design philosophy for ARC when we think what does it mean again for mainstream adoption for onchain money movement. There's several aspects that we think are critical. The first is programmable privacy. The ability for an institution to be comfortable with some activity being transparent and publicly available, but other activity perhaps being more private. This includes your transaction details, your balances, your positions, and the different counterparties that might be involved. So that's one important design philosophy.
The other is regardless of whether it's public or private to the world, you need to have authorized visibility. You need to have entities, your counterparties that always have access to this information and that needs to be available to you at all times. But the magic in all of this is to have one network that can manage both. So you're not siphoning flow from a public blockchain that's transparent to a private blockchain that might be more protected. Having one network that can handle this and give you that flexibility is really what's important.
So I wanted to show you a quick demo of how this would work in ARC today. What you're seeing is a BUID contract. And so what's available to you is you can see all the wallets that hold the BUID. You can see the amounts and in some cases you can actually identify the wallets. But if you're a user or if you're someone who wants to subscribe to BlackRock's fund, maybe you don't want to have all that information publicly available. So in ARC by opting into the privacy feature you're able to subscribe to the fund immediately BUID is minted but it's private BUID. It moves into a wallet and all the transaction details of that wallet are now private and can only be seen by the person themselves and most important by BlackRock.
BlackRock needs to be able to have access to this information. So when they're working with their auditors and compliance team and regulators, they need to know that these assets are handled in a compliant way. And so the ability to move in and out of privacy and have that ability to have some transactions private where others are public. This is one of the major unlocks that we think are going to be very, very important for mainstream adoption. This is why we're excited about building with you all. This is why we're excited we're building with you. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone.
Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Circle VP Business Development Matt Stafford.
Good afternoon everyone. Great to have you here. Now we've just talked about how some of the world's largest companies are lining up on our network as validators. So, let's look at what this actually unlocks, starting with the money movements at global scale.
Now, when we talk about money movements across borders, what we're really talking about is one of the oldest frictions in finance, the gap between where value sits today, where value needs to go, and what currency that value needs to land in. This matters even more in regions where people and businesses are moving across currencies every single day, but want to store this value in a stable digital dollar asset.
ARC is a great home for this because it combines near instant settlement finality, low-cost transactions, and the ability to support financial activity across onchain FX, payments, collateral, and liquidity, all in a single home.
To show what this looks like in practice, I'd like to welcome to the stage the CEO and co-founder of Ripio, Sebastian.
Thank you everyone. Ripio's mission is to democratize access to financial services and digital economy in emerging markets, particularly in Latin America using blockchain technology. In markets like Argentina or Brazil, two things matter at once. People want to hold value in dollars to protect their savings, but they still need to pay, send, and receive money in local currency. Ripio helps to make that possible in a way that's more intuitive, faster and cheaper than incumbent cross-border remittance providers. But let's make that concrete with a simple example.
All right, it's not passing. But today, if someone wants to transfer value from Brazil to Argentina, that FX leg is often slow and expensive. First we're seeing a familiar corridor of BRL to ARS through a traditional flow. This is a common transfer corridor for individuals and businesses in LatAm today. And next we see the onchain version with BRL and ARS. These are two Ripio issued local stable coins through Uniswap on ARC. What matters is not that just the currency swap happens but it's vastly improves the cross-border payments efficiency and economy and the FX now happens onchain with near instant settlement in terms of fee bottleneck with delay clearing times at bad rates in addition to Uniswap that you can use today. This is live right now and you can test it yourself. This FX experience will soon be available for institutions that want to do larger trades on a stable FX which we are really excited about. Thank you.
Now many users especially in countries with high inflation and volatile currencies prefer to hold their savings in USDC only moving assets into a local currency when they actually need to make a payment. So to show this next piece, I'd like to welcome to the stage Milan, co-founder and wizard of Moro.
Thank you. Hi everyone. Super pumped to be there. As most of you I think you know what Moro we're doing. We're building a credit infrastructure to make the capital more efficient and accessible through the globe. We're super excited to partner with ARC because we think it's uniquely positioned to help us bring trusted credit and earn solutions to a broader set of users either like institutions or retail users across the globe.
And when we see many people and businesses especially in emerging markets see non-USD stable coins that are becoming increasingly important alongside USDC and with Moro rather than holding USDC the local currency you can actually hold USDC use that as saving account and borrow the local currency so that you can spend at the merchant store or get that into fiat.
As you can see on that video, Moro offers a very secure way for users to hold those USDC and earn trusted yield in the process. That means that users do not have to choose between holding USDC and holding the local currency and actually they can actually do both through the Moro infrastructure.
And what's more exciting is that Moro new fixed rate market Midnight is coming to ARC very, very soon. What that means is that it will make the value proposition even stronger by fixing the rate at which borrowers are going to borrow their local currency eliminating the uncertainty of borrowing against that collateral. And so we are super happy already 200 mil on Moro on ARC. Thanks.
Thanks. Great to have you.
So we've now witnessed how ARC, Ripio, and Moro are bringing together FX, savings, collateral, and payments into a single connected flow creating utility for consumers and businesses all across Latin America. But that's just one part of the opportunity. Now let's look at the opportunity from a different part of the world where major financial institutions are exploring how onchain financial infrastructure can support new financial products and global currency flows. And for this please welcome Erica Peterson and Misi Okiyama, board member of SBI Holdings and CEO of Digital Asset Holdings.
SBI is one of Japan's largest financial institutions and it moved into digital assets earlier and much more deliberately than almost any institution of its size anywhere in the world. But what makes that notable is not that they built a crypto business alongside a traditional one. It is that they are bringing the traditional one onchain for the customers they already serve. They were the first firm in Japan registered to handle USDC. They now issue and are scaling their own yen stable coin JPYC and they are a founding validator on ARC. Okiyama, it is great to have you here.
So first question, why does SBI believe that the future of financial services will increasingly be built on chain?
You know we do not look at blockchain just as the machine to create new class of asset like crypto asset. I mean they are significantly important themselves too and as a matter of fact we run one of the largest VASPs in Japan as well but we see I think the previous speakers mentioned about it but the new features that blockchain has you know smart contract programmability interoperability and stuff like that those enables blockchain to do something that was not possible before the blockchain time. And that will drastically change the liquidity of asset and money movement. And you know we always talk about this internally too but money and assets they are like water or liquid they will move from one place to the other and they try to move to places where there's a less friction and conflict right so I think it's natural course of think that all the economy will start to move into onchain economy.
Where the water runs is a great metaphor. So what building blocks do you and SBI see as being needed to make that vision happen?
In my view, I think there are four important factors. One is trusted infrastructure and assets to be traded and methodology to settle the transactions and then regulatory environment. You know as previous speakers I'll mention trusted infrastructure is just essential to this whole thing because why would we put our important money and assets on something that we don't trust but at the same time you know trusted infrastructure itself is not just sufficient because we have to have asset or some kind of rights to be traded in that domain. So that's also important and we need a methodology to settle I think USDC is a good example here but you know because just having assets you what do you do with it right you can buy them but I guess you know crypto exchange has been sort of buy for a while you know people exchanging crypto to different type of cryptos but that's not really efficient so the settlement methodology is important and finally I think the regulatory environment is very, very important.
Especially I want to emphasize most I believe that most important thing about regulatory environment is the interoperability between the jurisdictions because if the transactions stop at the border every time then we are not really getting the real superpower of the blockchain economy.
Okay. So you have been steadily building the capabilities to participate in an onchain financial system. We've talked about these four capabilities. Where do you see Circle and very specifically ARC is fitting?
I think Circle and ARC would play like very center role in this whole thing because I just talked about four factors but Circle has two things right. USDC very famous stable coin and also the new ARC that we are launching right now. So it will be a very important role it is going to be playing in our ecosystem as well but at the same time I hope that SBI will play very important role in that ARC network and as a founding validator.
Okay. So our relationship with SBI, it
It began with Circle and SBI bringing USDC to Japan. And as you mentioned, you're one of our founding validators. How do you think about what we're going to build next together as we look to the future?
Right. Let me talk a little bit about our pre-existing relationship. It started with USDC. I mean today the event is not about stablecoins, so I'm not going to get into too much detail about the drama, but we did have a very exciting project bringing USDC into Japan. It was very significant for I think both SBI and Circle in a way that it was the first stablecoin to be introduced in Japan. So SBI got to be the first player to have the license and introduce any kind of stablecoin in Japan. But at the same time I think it's a very important step for Circle too because it was USDC that was what Japan adopted first as a stablecoin. So that was a great project. We have a joint venture in Japan together and we are participating as a founding validator in this Arc network too. So you know we have a very good strong partnership and I think what we can do, you know I can go on the list of it but the first thing I can think of right now is as you mentioned earlier we just have introduced a Japanese yen-based stablecoin, JPYC. So perhaps we can settle among each other, right? Japanese yen to US dollar, USDC to JPYC and vice versa. And I think it's not just a faster version of what we have the FX transaction today, but I think it's a whole new different product or service that we can provide.
And hopefully that all lives on Arc. Okay, last question. If we look several years ahead, what do you think success is going to look like for onchain global finance?
That is pretty clear. I think the success of this onchain global finance is that we can make a transaction 24/7, 365 days, anytime, anywhere without any friction. That's the goal. And you know I want to use kind of, I wouldn't say stupid, but the small example of what I'm talking about. I live in Japan but I still maintain my attorney license in Ohio and I have to renew the registration every once in a while, right? And I have to pay for registration fee. In order for me to do that, well, I work for a Japanese company. I earn in Japanese yen. So, I go to my Japanese bank account and ask them to convert my yen to dollars. But it's not as simple because they will demand me to open up a US dollar account which takes another several days and extra fees. And well, it's good that I have it already but if you would do that then you know it would take weeks for you to create a dollar account and then once you have US dollar you will transfer the US dollar to your US account and then you will use your, I don't know, check, I don't nobody use checks anymore here but maybe debit cards or whatever to make the settlement. Or another alternative is I guess I could use my credit card to pay Supreme Court of Ohio. But the exchange rate is, you know, I don't want to make any negative comment of other people's business, but it's, you know, it's a couple yen on top of the current exchange. So that's not really favorable, right? And all right so attorney registration fee is a very small transaction, very small amount of money but that's exactly my point. You know for small transactions I don't have to go on this financial project to make that transaction happen. In the perfect world if we are successful doing this then I can just pay it on the network and then be done with it. So I'm hoping that in several years SBI's product or asset will be put on Arc network and people can transact using JPYC, USDC and stuff like that. Or at the same time maybe we can introduce US product onto the network and our Japanese clients of SBI group they can make the transactions on that network that we are.
I love it, let's make it happen. And I love your example of paying for your law license because it's an everyday version of something quite enormous. Well, that's what we're here to build. And Okiyama, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you again for having me.
Please welcome to the stage Circle VP Business Development, Ben Morris.
Good afternoon. I think anyone who's been in this space can agree that trading has been the subject of massive innovation. Arc builds on this innovation through deterministic finality, stablecoin denominated gas, and institutional grade capabilities that will help to usher in this next phase of growth and adoption. To explore these themes further, I'd like to welcome two guests. Stefano Fracchi, CTO of Extended, and Daniel Amir, global head of investor relations for eToro.
Stefano. Starting with you, Extended is already an established perpetuals DEX. Why have you decided to fully migrate to Arc?
So Extended sees a clear opportunity for us to capture global markets by leveraging the always-on infrastructure that Arc provides along with the deep stablecoin liquidity. And the newest topic is these high-quality tokenized assets. Circle is taking a very regulatory-first approach and that is a very strong fit for the audiences that we're tracking. In that regard and in that topic of high-quality assets, EURC is a big deal for us. EURC allows us to offer products with a quote currency that our European users understand. They don't have to do complex mental arithmetic to understand the status of their trades. It opens a lot of new avenues for us. Alongside this, Extended currently offers about 40 to 50 single-name perpetual markets. These are equities that are not available anywhere else in any even centralized crypto exchanges. Arc's performance characteristics allows us to expand this to finally hit our goals of hundreds if not thousands of these new single-name perpetual markets.
Right. And Daniel, eToro has an existing strategic partnership with Extended. How do Arc and Extended create more opportunities for your users?
Yeah, thank you Ben and thank you for having us. So eToro is a platform where you trade, save, spend, and invest. We're a platform that was established in 2007 with the vision that everyone should trade and invest in a simple and transparent way. Today we are a regulated, NASDAQ-listed platform with millions of users in 75 different countries. Our goal is to provide users with 24/7 access to trading. Arc provides stablecoin liquidity, high-quality collateral, and institutional-grade infrastructure to make that all possible. And Arc for Extended really provides kind of the foundation to enable single-name markets on chain and enables eToro the venue to bring TradFi liquidity on chain. We're starting today with hedging on markets where crypto-native liquidity is deep on Extended platform, allowing support for 24/7 trading access on the eToro app.
Thank you Daniel. Now I'm going to show a quick demo of us kind of welcoming the Circle family of assets into Extended. Yeah, let's run it. Go. So, as I said, EURC is going to be supported natively from day zero. This is a big deal for our European users. They get paid in euros. They don't need to convert it. So here we go. We're going to deposit some euros and the Arc is so fast that we have to rebuild our UI. It's crazy. And now that I've got these euros, I'm going to open a position in oil. And you can see it's opened successfully. And the other asset that we're adding support for on day zero is Circle BTC. Circle BTC is a very high-quality Bitcoin wrapper which will allow again users to deposit diverse assets for their collateral requirements on Extended and we look forward to adding more and more support for assets that are being tokenized on Arc. Our goal is to support hundreds of collaterals to allow strategies that we can't even think about. Yeah, thank you.
Wonderful. Wonderful. Arc is helping financial firms pioneer new trading opportunities for users to take advantage of today's global 24/7 market. Extended and eToro demonstrate this and they demonstrate that traditional finance and crypto firms alike can take advantage of these opportunities. Daniel, Stefano, thank you so much for joining.
Thank you. Thank you everyone.
Our next partner has pioneered the automated market maker model and remains one of the most trusted names in decentralized finance. I'd like to welcome Hayden Adams, founder and CEO of Uniswap to the stage.
Hayden, Uniswap and USDC actually have some shared history, right? They were both launched in 2018 and USDC was almost there from the very very start. Arc marks the first time that these two organizations are actually building something together. What does that open up?
Yeah, before I came out here today, I actually checked the all-time volumes and USDC has traded over or almost $2 trillion dollars on Uniswap over the past nine years. Which is just incredible. And you know what I think about when I see that is just like the power of decentralized finance and blockchains. Like you know, our teams never actually like collaborated in a direct product launching type of way before. And despite that, you know, there was two trillions of dollars of shared activity. And so that just gets at like the power of DeFi and the power of decentralized financial rails. And you know, we're really excited to be working with you guys in terms of Arc and building liquidity there and bringing Uniswap V4 there day one. There's, you know, we've done a lot of work over the past few years to increase the expressiveness and programmability with Uniswap V4 which allows for market structures that are customized to pretty much any asset class. And you know a lot of what Arc is thinking about is how to bring more assets on chain and new assets on chain and so I think it's like a really incredible match there. And I think that there's some really interesting things that we'll unlock in terms of how tokenized stocks trade and how stablecoins trade and how they're accessed around the world.
Yeah, on that point, I guess stablecoins are obviously a core use case for Arc, but we also expect many different types of assets to come on chain. Uniswap's pool.xyz will be a huge driver of that activity. Can you share a little bit about what is it and what will deploying on Arc actually enable?
Yeah, I want to talk about pools and I also kind of want to contextualize it more broadly in Uniswap V4. Because you know pools is a liquidity launchpad that we created and it makes it really easy to instantly create a liquidity pool on top of Uniswap for free. We don't add any margin where you know most launchpads tend to kind of take additional fees on top. You know what a lot of token launchpads have done has really made it really easy to create pools on Uniswap and so some of them have done a lot more innovative stuff but we wanted to kind of raise the bar there. And so I think that just like this process of early price discovery for new assets has been like a long time problem not just in crypto but all of society. And you know automated market making has helped a lot with that but the sort of what does it feel like to create a new asset day one, how can you make that early liquidity and early price discovery as efficient as possible, as low cost as possible, as fair as possible, I think is a thing that maybe people don't think about enough. A lot of early activity has had issues around what people call sniping or all these different things. And so with pools, we really tried to kind of invest in thinking about how to create a fairer launch process for new assets. And a fair kind of bootstrapping of liquidity.
And of course, one of these assets is Circle's wrapped BTC, cbBTC, which will be available on Arc. What role can Uniswap help in developing that market?
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, Bitcoin is the first and still largest by far crypto asset. And you know, I think that just having, you know, there's always been the challenge of having deep liquidity because it doesn't support native smart contracts. And so I think having Circle Bitcoin on Arc will really allow for the programmability of EVM to kind of benefit. And so I think that Uniswap again with V4 has just really expressive market structure. And what that lets you do is I think that there's just so much untapped value in experimenting with how to better automate market making, better create automated liquidity. And I think that you really want all the assets in one place and so I think that there's definitely a huge amount of kind of value for I think that Uniswap can basically be the deepest liquidity source for cbBTC.
Yeah. And as we think about the infrastructure that Uniswap and Arc is enabling, where do you think DeFi will be in 10 years?
Yeah. So, you know, I have sometimes when people ask me this, I'm like, well, I think we'll all have robot arms and stuff, but I think that, you know, when I think about the future, right, pretty much, you know, like all information, almost all information is digitized and put on the internet. And I think that majority of value will be tokenized and put on blockchains. And people say well why? And I think that the answer is the exact same one right like digitizing information and the internet basically just made most information globally available instantly to the entire world. And that's part of the story right people talk a lot about the efficiency and the global nature and the 24/7 nature. And that was one and that's going to be part of it. But then there's like this other side to the internet that it really changed, didn't just change what information was available to who and how fast but it also changed how people interact with information. It is a more expressive programmable medium for interacting with information which is how we got to all these things like social media. And so I think that crypto will have that same dichotomy of, you know, on the internet there were existing businesses eventually moved their businesses onto the internet. Right, stores, you know, Barnes & Noble becoming Amazon or whatever and then you had internet native businesses that were like what would not be possible without this technology and that's things like social media or whatever. And you know when I think about crypto right you have like projects like Uniswap that are, you know, this would not be possible without blockchains and then you have things like USDC is basically taking an asset that lives off-chain and bringing it onto blockchain rails which unlocks what's possible for it. And so that's kind of, you know, so I think there's going to be the world of crypto-native assets and there's going to be the world of, you know, what we're calling real world assets. And that's going to be pretty much all assets that exist. And I think that, you know, probably the better question is like what isn't going to be tokenized? And then, you know, the end goal of all of that is basically just making markets cheaper, more global, more expressive, changing the profile. You know, the internet changed who can create content and we're going to change who can create markets. And I think that's really powerful and what I'm really excited about.
Amazing. Hayden, thank you so much for joining.
I think just to end, beyond Uniswap, Extended, and eToro, we have several other partners including Aerodrome, Drift, EdX, Fomo, Pump.fun, and many others that are going to partner with Arc. So with partners like these it's no surprise that Arc is rapidly becoming the home for builders across the entire ecosystem. In addition to popular social trading apps and launchpads, many developers are also building new and innovative trading primitives. And what's more, every single major wallet will support Arc out of the gate, bringing in hundreds of millions of users. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Circle VP Engineering and Product Management, Gagan Mack.
Hey you all, we've had quite a morning. Thank you so much for being with us here. Here's the most exciting thing about today for me. You heard from BlackRock, SBI, DTCC, Uniswap, Morpho, eToro, Extended, and everyone feels at home. The finest of Wall Street and the coolest of DeFi, all on the same platform, all in the same room. That is Arc. You have about half a million builders and people watching online as well. We wouldn't call it an economic OS for the internet unless we were able to fulfill a variety of use cases and bring a variety of builders on the platform. The financial institutions give the resilience and the stability that is required for a long-lasting platform and the builders feel comfortable innovating on. And when you bring these two sides together, then customer journeys become fluid. There's no fragmentation or stuck liquidity and financial workflows just work. A payment when it settles on Arc on a wallet in Arc. From there, your capital can instantly be moved to earn in various wallets or pools. Trade in a variety of ways, pay your vendors, and buy assets that you are interested in or just shop around for memes. It's soft for your game and it's all happening in smooth workflows because of 100 plus partner applications that are launching on day one. And there's also connectivity to 20 plus networks. So users don't have to keep hopping between wallets and keep orchestrating complex flows just to get more out of their capital.
Now this is all possible because Arc is built as a full stack platform. You heard from Nikhil and Jeremy today about how we think about it as a full stack problem to solve. So I'll go a little bit deeper into it and show you some of the cool stuff we've been working on. The base layer is a network of course. Arc is a layer 1 network with global institutions as validators which means that for enterprises the risk trading and the risk profiling becomes much simpler because you always know who the validator cohort is. Stablecoin as gas means you do not have to worry about accounting with volatile native tokens and subsecond finality means that capital moves with ease. It's never stuck. On top of that, we alluded to stablecoins. Today, Arc launches with USDC, USYC, EURC, and 14 partner stablecoins that cover countries where 1.3 billion people live and governs 45% of global GDP. And today is just day one. We hope to onboard the entire world's currencies on Arc.
Now these assets on themselves are not locked in on Arc. We have extended Circle's interop stack which is a leading interop stack on chain. CCTP is the way how money moves, how data moves with TCP/IP. CCTP moves money. Our goal is to enable every blockchain that has USDC to have one-click, one-second connectivity to the applications. So wallet on Arc, your USDC when it's held on Arc or your assets that are held on Arc they can be deployed on any network within a second with one click under one cent. That is our goal and so we are extending our interop stack to all the asset issuers who are doing issuing assets on Arc as well.
We talked about developer experience leading to good user experience. Now over a period of time as there have been numerous networks developers have had to rearchitect flows over and over again for instance bridging, sending and receiving across networks, on-ramping and off-ramping, creating a unified balance. All of this stuff is abstracted into app kits. What used to be hundreds of lines of code is now maybe tens. And then Arc Studio is our coding agent. From Arc Studio, you can go from an idea to smart contracts deployed on Arc within minutes. There's security standing baked in so common vulnerabilities in contracts can be avoided. And this is just out of the box.
Building is only the beginning. Builders also need discoverability. Arc Portal launches for users to discover the best of Arc. Over here we will feature hundreds of applications that are going live and there will be novel experiences and novel ways to experience finance for users through agents. You'll be able to construct agent wallets, create flows, chat in natural language with your money, reason and transact in the same place. And when you package all of this together, that is when it feels like an operating system. The right levels of abstraction exist for builders whether they're protocol developers or app builders. They should be able to pick the right primitives. That's what we are constructing for.
So let me show you how developers will experience Arc Studio. This is Arc Studio. Here you are building an allow-listed tokenized share class for a robotics company. In studio you can just specify your intent in natural language. This is of course a technical example. The contract gets created and there is a problem here that the transfer from function skipped the allowlist check. So the agent corrects itself, introduces that check, runs the contract test, ensures that the tests pass and deploys the contract on Arc. Norman Robotics is live on Arc, constructs the front end for you to click mint. You'll see that soon. Once you mint shares, whatever you specified as allocation gets allocated to the wallet addresses. You can check the block explorer and the transaction is settled there and still linked.
This builder journey is only the beginning. We understand that builders face a lot more than just coding an application. So along with studio and app kits, discoverability with portal will continue to help builders get distribution and get surface with users. We are creating an Arc builder fund to support you through your journey as you try to find product market fit for novel ideas. An Arc security service is going to ensure that you are able to get support as you scale for any security related issues. We are here to support the journey of builders through and through.
There's something else I'm really excited to show you that is our portal. There's something that we have been thinking about for a while that when you get on chain and you try to use different applications, you don't know which application, you shouldn't need to know which application is on which chain like Polymarket runs really well on Polygon. You should be able to use it if you have USDC you should be able to use it without having to manually bridge. So here in our portal once you have your USDC in an Arc wallet, let's say you want to bet that Chelsea is going to win over the weekend. We are big Chelsea fans here, right? So Chelsea is going to beat Brentford. You can ask a couple of questions, figure out what you want to place a bet on and in natural language you can authorize a transaction and all the complexity of finding gas tokens, bridging, forwarding, relaying, all of that gets extracted away and from speaking in natural language to deploying your liquidity into an application is a single step and this is what we mean by Arc wallets serving as liquidity hub for you guys.
This stuff is live today, but there's a long road ahead. We are at the beginning of a multi-year journey. Resilience, scalability, and privacy are paramount when finances are concerned. And to talk more about what's ahead, I want to invite my colleague Sankit Jen. Come on up.
Thank you. Hi everyone. We built Arc on the principle that an economic operating system for the world only works when the world runs it. When institutions running a network span every major market, the applications building on it can serve every major market as well. Global infrastructure is what lets global applications emerge at all. We believe a network is only as resilient as the institutions behind it. And we're building more of that resilience directly into the network. As you may have heard, mainnet is live today. We have over 100 apps live, but we've also minted 10 billion ARC tokens, the entire initial supply, making Circle the first publicly traded company to mint a network token. The mint moves us towards our next milestone. In 2027, we plan to transition the network to proof of stake. This milestone will serve for four main reasons. Security: validators securing the network will earn rewards. Economic alignment: network fees convert to ARC and flow back to people staking it. Utility: the deeper you build on ARC, the more useful it becomes. And governance: the people using the network should be the ones governing it.
I mentioned before that global infrastructure is what lets global applications emerge, which raised a question we kept coming back to. What does an application actually need from the network powering it? We realized that the answer depends entirely on the application. A block trade, a payment stream, an AI agent all have very, very different needs. Historically, that meant standing up an entirely new network or moving your flows off chain. We wanted one network that could serve every developer for what they needed. So, today we're introducing Arc sectors, a purpose-built lane for each class of financial activity, all on one network. The three we're most excited about are privacy, which you've heard about today, which allows you to encrypt balances and transaction details with scope disclosure for auditors and regulators, payments designed for hundreds and thousands of transactions per second for agentic and institutional payment volume, and agents, verifiable identity and provable execution for software that transacts on your behalf. And we expect many more sectors to emerge as the activity on the network grows to dictate it.
Let me walk you through the privacy sector on a public chain. Today, your balance and every transaction you make are visible to everyone. No treasurer runs payroll that way. No desk shows its position that way. Privacy on-chain has always cost you something. Either you have to learn a new language or a new toolkit. You wait on proofs, some give up speed or you give up the properties that made blockchains interesting in the first place. The privacy sector encrypts balances and transaction details with post-quantum security end to end while staying auditable through contract and wallet owners granting scoped access. And it costs nothing to adopt. Same block as public transactions, same EVM code, same tools. Let me walk you through an example of a private payment on Arc Portal. When I go to Arc Portal, you'll see my unified balance of public and private. I'll be able to select $50 and click off toggle for private send. After I continue and select my friend Brad for the payment, you'll notice that before I finish the sentence, the transaction will have settled with the same block, same finality as everything else on Arc. But Sankit, what about the block explorer? Let's go check it out. On the block explorer, you'll notice that all the transactions are private. Only after logging in with a similar experience of connecting your wallet will I be able to see my private transactions are scoped specifically to me. And no one on this network can unilaterally decrypt it. Encrypted on-chain, settled in the same block, and I get to see who controls it. I think that's pretty cool.
The internet has only ever known one kind of economic actor. People. Agents are the second and there will be far more of them. They will need to hold value, move it, and be trusted to do so. No economic infrastructure has ever been built for a user like that. I want to give it back to Gagan to show you what it takes.
Thank you. Let's talk about agents. Who here has used agents? Almost everyone. Who here has given their bank account information or social security or something which makes you uncomfortable to an agent? Early adopters, early adopter and chief. But most people are not raising their hands. Every agent wants to be useful to you. They want your personal information. I was trying an agent that is going viral and I asked it, 'What can you do for me?' It said, 'The fastest way for me to be useful to you is give me your Gmail.' Now, I have 20 years of my private history and life in Gmail, family related stuff, spouse related stuff. I'm not going to give access to all of that. So, I asked it, 'How can I trust you with my email?' and it said fair question but an honest answer is better than a reassuring one that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. So I went a step further very specifically. Hey, how do you protect my data at inference time? At inference time, your content is plain text to me. So where is it getting indexed? Where is getting used? Where else will it come up? I have no idea.
And every day I come across these headlines. Everything that is hackable will get hacked because software is getting generated at runtime to solve a problem for you and it's beating the static software that has been written over 40 years. And we continue to spend a lot of money. We are investing trillions in infra and hundreds of billions and we are hoping for business returns but money spent is only input. And token use is accelerating. So how will we get our returns on all this investment?
Agents want to help you but they are limited by access to your data. As an enterprise, are you willing to give agents access to employee records, health information, money, customer information, credentials? All of this stuff is a big question for enterprises today because intelligence is abundant. Token prices are plummeting and when intelligence is abundant, trust is the bottleneck.
But we have solved this problem once before. We learn to trust strangers on the internet. You get into a stranger's car. You spend your vacation in a stranger's home and you invite strangers home to help you with some complex tasks. And we learned to follow a very simple rubric. Trust is a function of the number of jobs someone has done, the quality of the jobs, and some trust arbiter in between. Dispute arbiter in between. So here Vitali has 781 overall jobs with five-star ratings. Seems quite reliable. So I brought him in to assemble IKEA furniture and he did a phenomenal job. And if he would have messed up then TaskRabbit, Fiverr or any of these guys would have made me whole. That's how we learned to trust strangers on the internet and made our lives so much easier. We believe that in the future you will trust agents. Similarly, there will be a way for you to trust agents and hire them to help you manage your health, help you manage your finances, reduce your taxes, and so much more.
At Circle, we have been really good with instilling trust through open protocols and open software. Earlier, you heard USDC passed $100 trillion in transaction volume. USDC is an open contract and it works on 30 plus networks. Works in the open. It's an open dollar protocol. So, we have been working on figuring out how we can extend trust to agents as well. And we are working with our platform to create a chain of trust for agents. It starts with your wallet on ARC and your private key is the one that controls everything whether you're a developer or a user. Now, you're building as a developer agents in Codex, Cloud, Cursor. You can continue to build your agents anywhere. You can create an agent account on ARC. You can rent your repo and create an account on Arc in Arc Studio. Again, with natural language, you will be able to configure your agent, give it an identity, give it your developer profile and that will create an agent as a worker.
But this worker also needs a runtime and we are working on Agent VM which is agent virtual machine, a secure environment so that agents can run their inference in private and protect your data in this environment. The IO of the hash of the input output plus the code that ran, the hash of the code and the fingerprint of the TEE, all of that gets packaged as a log and that log builds evidence of work. So remember he had 700 jobs. Now imagine an agent who continues to produce this evidence over and over and over again and that evidence is independently audited and the details of the work are only private to you. That is when you can start trusting the agent as a worker. And with some more qualitative feedback, we can construct that same rubric of trust for agents and they can be hired on the public internet.
How this will all work? I want to invite our head of agent engineering, Hao Dao, to show you how. Come on up.
All right. Thank you, Gagan. And hello everyone. So, Gagan just talked about the chain of trust and why it matters. So, I'm going to show you how it looks like to use it. So, basically, every enterprise we talk to are telling us the same thing. I'm ready to hire agents, but I'm not ready to handle stranger, my credential, my data, and my money. So, let's close the gap from both sides. First, the builder. Next, I'm going to show you how easy it is to set up trust agents within Arc Studio. So, when you open Arc Studio, you'll see an option to register my agent. So, you can register agent by connecting your GitHub repo or upload a zip file. Once connected, Studio will read the code, discover the capabilities, and set up the agent profile for you. Next, pick a runtime. So we have a primary runtime called Agent VM out of box for you to use or you can go with your own cloud provider. With one more tab, Studio is going to publish your agent on Arc, an Arc identity, a fingerprint of the code and a link of the agent that is ready to share in any of your favorite AI interface are now created for you.
Now, let's flip to the user side. As a user, I want to be able to hire, discover, and hire this agent from any AI interface I want. So, we're going to show you how it's going to look like within our portal. When you open our portal, you can see a list of agents with their ratings and job history. After agent is being hired, we'll scan the agent's on-chain identity, the runtime attestation, and then open up a private environment for the entire conversation. From now on, whatever you send, you upload stays within that private environment. No one else has access to including Circle. So once the job is being, once the plan is being accepted, the agent is going to execute and complete a job and from this point everything will be settled on Arc including your job history, the runtime attestation. This shows you how to hire a contractor on a public internet. A clear scope of the work, a budget, a record of the work, and everything stays in a dedicated private runtime environment and never leaves it.
So where does this go? Looking forward 2027, as Sankit mentioned earlier. So we're exploring a dedicated agent sector on Arc built for agents operating in real financial markets with four properties. A verifiable identity so every agent carries a registered identity to Arc with a provable credential and a reputation attached. Agreed mandates. So this is the one I care about most. Before any work starts both sides needs to agree on a deal. A deal specifies the scope, the price, the deliverable and how the work get accepted. The mandate agents runs under is the deal itself. Policy enforcement: policies like spending limit, counterparty rules are all checked and enforced before every single transaction. Last but not least, auditable records. So every agent action are locked on chain. So the evidences can be verified against what was agreed earlier. An evidence without agreement proves the agent did something. An evidence with agreement proves the agent did exactly what it was hired to do. So at Circle we firmly believe that trusted agents on the open internet can help you scale enterprise to work with no ceiling. With that, Dan, back to you.
Thanks. Imagine infinitely scalable enterprises. You can hire the most expert workers that on board instantly on demand and then release them when the work is done. That's super cool. We talked about a lot of things today. So, I want to describe what is live today. Our public mainnet of course secured by global institutions, 100 plus applications. You can pay, trade, borrow, lend, earn, get your assets on Arc. Agent stack is live. You can use it today. Now, there's stuff that you saw that sneak peek. You're not going to see the Agent VM on our portal just yet. We are developing it. If you liked what you saw, this is the QR code. Sign up for early access. We would love to partner with you and there's a lot of cool stuff to build together. Today is just the start of a journey. We are so grateful for you to be here. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Circle co-founder, chief executive officer and chairman Jeremy Allaire and a16z crypto founder and managing partner Chris Dixon.
All right. How you doing?
I'm good. Thanks for having me. It's exciting day.
It is. It is. It's been awesome to work with you during this journey.
Yeah. Well, thank you. Into Arc and everything else and for the last decade or two or whatever. We met decades ago or you know a long time ago. But I thought we'd just start this conversation a little bit just sort of talking about this moment. And you know, you're hearing these themes here today. AI, AI agents, just like technology as a whole in this like period of like hyper acceleration of software, software eats the world is like even bigger. And crypto. And so you're both your firm and you specifically are I think very steeped in all of that. And just like talk to me about how you see this moment we're in.
Yeah, I mean it feels like we're in the kind of most accelerationist moment in my career. And that includes obviously stuff happening in crypto, but also AI areas I don't really know as well like bio and from what I hear like energy and robotics and that's not something I do but it seems pretty incredible. In crypto it's kind of a weird time because on the one hand kind of some sentiment in some quarters is down and some prices or token prices are down and so forth. On the other hand we have more institutions entering than ever, more kind of legitimate actors, more growth. Like I think the growth of stablecoins as an example which obviously you are the pioneer or one of the main pioneers of and in the center of. I think it's very important that it's growing in a way that's uncorrelated to trading. Right? It's one of the first real use cases. It's not about sort of trading and things like that. And so I think in crypto it's this weird kind of tale of two cities where I think we're kind of moving from sort of an ideological early phase into a pragmatic kind of like real application phase which is a healthy thing right and you obviously what you're doing here and all the key partners you announced I think show that right. And just your posture in terms of building serious tech and taking compliance seriously and all of that. And then the AI world everyone follows that I mean it's just incredible both the development, the amount of investing going on, the rate of change. Our firm is very involved in this stuff and I think like a lot of this stuff I'm sure a lot of people here have used, you know, vibe coded and stuff it's truly incredible what's going on and it doesn't and it seems like it's going to continue at this pace. And you know as you're talking about today with the agents right we're only seeing the beginnings of it. Most of us only experience agents mostly as for vibe coding and things like that but I think it's very plausible that over the next decade we will have essentially an internet of agents right. We'll have at least an agent per person maybe many per person and that the internet was really the internet we live with today was designed for an internet of humans. And specifically like I kind of look at the world through the lens of networks and what I mean by networks is you know the internet's a network but then on top of the internet we build other networks. And so like originally there was the web which you were a pioneer of and email and sort of open protocol networks and then we had an era where we had, you know, kind of these company-backed networks like Facebook, Instagram, Uber, you name it. These are systems where you bring various parties together and it's really one of the magical things about the internet. Another way to say it is instead of just sort of single player, it's multiplayer, right? You think about AI today, it's mostly single player. Like it's mostly, you know, you're sitting in front of a thing, you're vibe coding something, and you're using it sort of it's like a really advanced old style computer. It seems inevitable that will become multiplayer and that the same thing that happened with the internet moving from like PCs to this networked world will happen with AI. And in that so what I think about is like in that world what will those networks be right. And so a very obvious one which you're all here today will be a financial network right. And a financial network will require a way to have programmable money and to move it around and the ideal form of money is probably a stable kind of money like the dollar. And ideally that system is global and inexpensive and fast and all those things and allows you to do things you could have done before like send money abroad but do it much more cheaply and faster. And I know obviously the pioneer of this here I'm explaining to Jeremy what he built but I'm getting to something maybe a little different which is at some point and you know and then as you've always described that you then have a programmable layer on top and you'll build trading and so forth. But then at some point like I think the big vision 10 years from now as you move beyond just sort of like replicating the existing financial world into really building like a machine age economy. Right. And I got a lot of this from Jeremy just to be clear. I'm feeding back what I learned from him. So these are not I'm not taking credit for these ideas but it's why we get along is we like the same things. But you know at some point right you can imagine a world where agents are spinning up something like a DAO like an ephemeral organization and performing tasks and sharing resources and spending money and all these other kinds of cool things. So I yeah I think it's like probably the most exciting time. It feels like all these things come together. They're accelerating. I don't know. It's like it's kind of magical time in...
My view. Totally. It is totally magical. We're making magic here. No, it is. And I think it was actually just this conversation just coming off of some of the stuff we were just showing, which is like how do you trust the work an agent does? How do you verify its identity? How does that work on open networks? How do we replicate some of the things that the internet did really well with like how do you trust people you don't know or trust get in a stranger's car? All these sort of trust, reputation, verifiability, etc. And it turns out that blockchains are actually really good at that. And when you're dealing with, you know, complex things, deterministic things like code and data execution paths, things like that, like it's actually really good for that. And so it does feel like the material is sort of all coming together.
This what's happening in the inference economy intersecting with what's happening in these like economic infrastructures and they kind of need each other although it's not totally apparent like people using Instinct or Muse think like oh that's an agent because it is doing these things but multiplayer is the key. I want to be able to have these things, you know, communicating with each other and not just like me as a user but like as you said like an agentic corporation that exists on chain and these sort of being two sides of the same coin, right? That feels, you know, feels like more of what could happen.
Let's pull that thread though a little bit. You were, you know, I think you've been a huge proponent of onchain organizations, onchain corporations, different structures for that in the US and the legal system and this sort of intersection of kind of agents, the onchain system and ways to kind of create organizations that could kind of, you know, be this fusion of AI and humans. I know you've made some investments in that space. Some interesting startups and companies that are very focused on it, including Sean who's here and Circle co-founder. But like talk to me a little bit about like go five years out, what is that like and what are these agentic corporations doing?
I mean it could be, I think it could be, I mean so obviously this is highly speculative but like for example you want to perform some kind of task, you want to, you know, create some piece of content, you want to solve a problem, you want to write some software. You've already seen that, you know, agents work. I mean I think anyone who vibe codes, you know, that like agents working together will do a better job and in fact a lot of these things will like spawn sub agents and things. And so, you know, the thought being just, you know, what if you could in the same way that you do in the economy sort of bring various people from different areas with different knowledge sets with different skills and get them to work together. We're already seeing early signs of it. I would argue like Uniswap, which is up here in a way. I mean it's one of the sort of earliest decentralized, it's really a DAO. It's instead of having New York Stock Exchange you have just a piece of immutable code and it has a business model and it, you know, it's a whole kind of thing where it's, you know, and it's a governance system. And so we've seen early signs of it in DeFi.
I think that to me the big question, like a lot of the stuff you described like trust, reputation, like this will happen and I think there's a fork in the road and one of the reasons I think I'm involved in this space and you are is it could happen with like Facebook controlling all of it or some big, you know, centralized financial institutions controlling all of it and charging high fees and extracting from it or it can happen. I mean so one way or another this will happen, right? Agents, there will be an internet of agents, they will interact with each other, there'll be an economic system, there'll be trust systems, there'll be reputation systems like everything you built here will exist in some form or another. The question, the real question and the reason that we, like I personally care about this, I think you do too and also we've been involved in policy and other things because we think it's important that there's at least people have the choice to do all this stuff in an open system that, you know, promises low fees, developer trust, they can build on top of it, composability and the users can participate.
Yeah. Well, and what we saw with the internet, this is why the internet was so exciting, right? I mean, there was a real fork in the road. People who aren't old enough don't remember, but, you know, there was AOL and these centralized services and then there was this alternative which was this open system and it led to this massive wave of innovation. And I think likewise having these systems like you're building be open are very important for incentivizing innovation, for having the benefits flow to consumers and developers, right?
Totally. So I mean this actually it kind of gets to the heart of the matter and one of the reasons you're here is that you're a participant and stakeholder on the ARC network. You actually led the pre-sale of the ARC token, the largest participant and you guys as a firm are active in these crypto networks and you think about them as governed networks with broad open participation. You've talked a little bit about the sort of why the technology we're building is great and it meets the need, meets the moment, the sort of emergent mainstream moment that we don't need to, we can, you can sing the praises, that's great. But more importantly like when you think about this as a stakeholder, as someone that wants to see distributed governance and see these become this, you know, this network ARC become a widely distributed, widely used and governed network. What do you see that looking like? Obviously, you're very close to what we're doing, but I think that's probably helpful for people here.
