CEO & Co-Founder, Circle
Fireside Chat with Jeremy Allaire
Powered by Restream https://restream.io/
About Jeremy Allaire
In recent appearances, Jeremy Allaire has emphasized the growth and adoption of Circle’s USDC stablecoin, stating that according to third-party data, USDC accounted for about 80% of dollar digital currency transactions in the first quarter of 2026, with nearly $30 trillion in on-chain transactions. He described USDC as a "free public utility on the internet" and noted that companies including Meta and DoorDash have adopted it. Allaire also discussed the launch of ARC, which he called an "economic operating system" designed for AI agents, and announced the presale of $220 million in ARC tokens with participants including Apollo, BlackRock, and Standard Chartered. He argued that stablecoins are becoming "approved and usable in the core guts of the financial system" and that the technology enables "full reserve banking" as opposed to fractional reserve banking. Allaire has also addressed regulatory developments, expressing support for market structure legislation and describing it as "critical" for unlocking capital market activity. He cited Circle’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic distributing aid to healthcare workers in Venezuela via digital dollars, and a program with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for aid disbursement. On competition, Allaire stated that the track record of consortium coins and new dollar stablecoins is that "none of them have worked," attributing this to strong network effects and high regulatory barriers. He characterized the mainstreaming of cryptocurrency on Wall Street as "tremendous validation" of the original vision for a new internet infrastructure layer for value and financial contracts.
Transcript (52 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
H
Host9:04
Okay, looks like we're live. Hello everyone, welcome to the now third event of the salon season hackathon. Today we're doing a fireside chat with Jeremy Allaire, who's the CEO and co-founder of Circle, and Anatoly Yakovenko, who is the co-founder and CEO of Solana. This will be about a 30 to 45 minute conversation. Really free for all. If you have any questions for the speakers during the event, please drop all your comments on the right hand side over there with your questions, and we'll take some time at the very end to try to address everything. I think since we're already seven minutes over and we have 300 people in here, we're just gonna jump right into it. So I think Jeremy, you really don't need an introduction, but if you want to take 30 seconds just to let everyone know who you are, and then Anatoly, I'll let you take it from there.
J
Jeremy Allaire9:53
Sure, absolutely. Great to be on, this is awesome. I'm Jeremy Allaire, as noted, CEO here at Circle. I've been building software platforms, tools, infrastructure, and other services in the internet space for almost 30 years. Really excited about all the amazing developer activity happening with Solana, and we're just happy to be a developer building stuff on Solana as well with USDC. Great to be on with you guys.
H
Host10:30
Awesome. Yeah, everybody runs their own podcast, so always get confused who's on whose show. So I kind of want to ask, can you tell us about the explosive growth of Circle over the last year?
J
Jeremy Allaire10:50
Absolutely. For perspective, eight years ago when we started, we thought there has to be a way to take fiat and build digital currency models around it as an open protocol layer that could run on the public internet, the same way we have information layers. That wasn't technically possible until the second generation of blockchains. Once that came around, we saw we could build a protocol layer for dollars on the internet and eventually other fiat currencies, and created USDC. It grew during 2018 and 2019, but really starting last year, it correlated to the pandemic. We started seeing incredible growth. When we started chatting with you guys about working on something, it was maybe 500 million USDC in circulation. In the last year, it's grown 30x. USDC on Solana alone now has 500 million, just in a few short months. We've grown from 500 million in circulation to 4 billion on January 1, and now to basically 15 billion in circulation. We're often adding a billion per week. On-chain transaction volume is well over 500 billion in the last year. We've been building out a broader set of stuff around it as well. The really important thing is we're seeing USDC brought to more chains, getting on infrastructure where you can do retail scale applications and capital market scale applications.
H
Host13:09
Do you know what the main use case is driving this globally?
J
Jeremy Allaire13:13
At a high level, I like to describe it as three waves of adoption. If you go back and read the original white paper around USDC on Centre.io, we have a very broad vision of connecting every person, every business, every financial service everywhere using a set of common protocols for money. When people ask what USDC is used for, I say, what would you use a dollar for? It should be from micro payments for a digital collectible, fractions of a penny, to collateral in a bond issue on a blockchain, and everything in between. When you look at the uses of USDC today, we see that breadth of use cases: big capital markets things on one end, and people doing innovative things like streaming payments for employees getting paid in countries like Venezuela or Argentina. The first wave of adoption is USDC as a preferred settlement medium for crypto capital markets. As digital asset markets have grown worldwide and become mainstream, and as more institutional capital has come in, having a reliable, trusted, always redeemable dollar digital currency has been really important. The second wave was born out of innovation with on-chain protocols like DeFi: interest rate markets, borrow and lending markets, other financial market primitives built on chain. USDC locked in DeFi contracts is huge, and the growth of DeFi has been a big driver. The third wave is generalized settlements. Venture capital companies are making investments with USDC, thousands of businesses sign up for Circle accounts to receive or make payments. People realize this is a great form factor for dollars. We're seeing growth in mainstream NFT marketplaces bringing in new users. That third wave is the smallest but will probably grow to be as big or bigger than the others.
H
Host17:25
Are the volumes at this point big enough that this is unstoppable? Is it no longer an experiment?
J
Jeremy Allaire17:42
I think the phenomenon of standardized dollar digital currencies on public chains with regulated private sector financial institutions around them is unstoppable. It will grow massively, eventually to trillions of dollars of value. If you look at M2 money supply, which is commercial bank money, it's a hundred trillion dollars. That's privately issued money. Fiat digital currency in this new form factor from internet-based financial services firms like Circle, Coinbase, and others will eat share from M2 over the long run. When people say the sum of digital currencies issued on chain is close to 75 billion, I think we're like 0.1% on the adoption curve. There are probably 150 million end users on blockchain, holding crypto, using wallets. That's growing at a nice rate, but it's like 1998 when you were still on dial-up internet. It was quirky, people saw the value but you had to be into it. There was hype, huge amounts of money, but it was 150 million people. Was it going to be billions? Maybe take five years. We're on a path to billions of people connecting to these public networks and using public digital currencies. It'll probably take three to five years, but it should be quite larger by then.
H
Host20:50
Awesome. 1998 was an interesting time because that's when you started seeing Friendster, Six Degrees as these applications. That was like, wow, this is an internet-only thing that can work. Is that like BitClout today? Every human in the world has a token. You take projects like Dapper Marketplace or OpenSea and you're like, this is only possible because of crypto, digital assets, public chains. You might want to sell your Beanie Baby on the internet, but it's too complicated, you don't trust it. We're in a similar place. Companies building services and applications will turn into huge customer bases, some will die because they didn't innovate or deliver real value. It's a good analogous timeline.
J
Jeremy Allaire22:24
Yeah, I have so much memory of that time as the world changing rapidly. I was coding as soon as I could figure it out.
H
Host22:38
Were you using ColdFusion back then?
J
Jeremy Allaire22:43
No, I was one of the nerds building Linux in high school, totally hopeless.
H
Host23:00
I heard you describe USDC as a bearer asset. Can you deep dive into what that means?
J
Jeremy Allaire23:14
USDC is a fully reserved digital currency issued by a regulated financial institution like Circle. The tokenized dollar is imbued with the characteristics of a digital currency. Once USDC is a token on a blockchain, it inherits all the attributes of those tokens. A USDC token on Solana is a bare instrument: if you have it, you have it. Once you've moved it from one address to another, it's final settlement. Digital currencies and digital assets are bearer assets, bringing some characteristics of cash and the internet together. Regulations now exist in most parts of the world where if you're an intermediary holding this on behalf of others, you have to be registered, meet KYC/AML requirements. The actual base layer is a bearer asset, which is extraordinarily powerful.
H
Host25:37
Is that concept something that could apply to NFTs and securities issued on chain?
J
Jeremy Allaire25:51
There are many different forms of tokens. Governance tokens of a DeFi protocol are unique: they provide governance and financial features, and you need to present them to vote. Those are bearer assets. NFTs are absolutely bearer assets, though people haven't fully grasped the connection between the digital material substance, the provenance of the NFT, and the NFT itself. There's work to do there, part of which is the convergence of decentralized file storage and NFTs. When you start bridging USDC, it's a hybrid: the market understands there is a reserve of Federal Reserve dollars. If you had a tokenized house or tokenized ownership of real estate, that could be a bearer asset. If someone wanted to trade fractional ownership of the Mona Lisa, the token itself could be a bearer asset. There will be questions.
H
Host28:04
In my mind, the distinction is that if I accidentally transfer this token to an invalid address, it's gone. The issuer doesn't control ownership.
J
Jeremy Allaire28:27
Exactly. You'll see a spectrum of situations. With a corporation that issues equity securities in the United States, it's a requirement that the company be able to reissue shares. The cap table is a record, there's a legal framework. If shares are lost, you can reissue them. When dealing with that kind of external legal fiduciary framework, tokens lose some of the bearer concepts. You could construct something legally where fractional ownership of a building is truly tradable, and if you lose it, everyone gets the value. That would have more bearer characteristics, but it's still an underlying financial contract that everyone agrees to.
H
Host30:19
These are things that seem like DAOs would have to carefully construct these rules into the smart contract itself.
J
Jeremy Allaire30:37
Progressive jurisdictions like Wyoming and Delaware are innovating in corporate law and new corporate forms. It's a wonderful place for innovation, something I'm particularly interested in.
H
Host31:06
Likewise. This seems much more secure than a Google Doc.
J
Jeremy Allaire31:19
When I think about what we're doing at Circle, we envision a world where hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of businesses keep their treasury in digital currency. More economic relationships will be mediated by smart contracts on blockchains: labor, trade, equity relationships. More of the substance of corporate forms will operate natively in this. A corporation is essentially a token with voting rights and economic rights that governs a treasury of tokens. It's a nexus of contracts, and we can have more of those contracts dematerialized into software with great characteristics on a blockchain.
H
Host33:09
I'm trying to imagine a world where once these contracts have been bulletproofed on chain, Wyoming just says, okay, if you use this particular contract, you don't even get a stamp.
J
Jeremy Allaire33:30
It's like open source. People say, this build of Linux can run aeronautics on an airplane, maybe you don't do that, but it has a certain level of hardness because so many people have validated its security and efficiency. There's a higher bar with smart contracts. You can imagine sharing economy business models disrupted labor relationships. The next generation will be on chain, with labor contracts as smart contracts. As a labor market participant, you can do that from anywhere in the world. It will create creative ways for value exchange between someone providing a service and the delivery of that service. Powerful suites of employment protocols will be built on chain, composable into all kinds of forms. It makes sense that employment protocols would be popular, and businesses would adopt them because they give the most flexibility.
H
Host35:25
If you were a seed stage startup, not Circle, what would you build? What actual products do you personally want to see?
J
Jeremy Allaire35:47
I have a lot of ideas for products, but I hope Circle builds them too. My co-founder Sean Neville and I talk about this. I would say the nature of corporate form would be a legal DAO. If I were starting a company or project, I would absolutely start it as some form of legal DAO, not a classic Delaware equity corporation. The incentive design on how you get people to collaborate and participate in building intellectual property has so much room for experimentation. But we're an old, crufty company, it's hard to make those changes.
H
Host37:28
That's crazy how fast the space moves. One of the fastest growing, most innovative companies in crypto is like, we're too old.
Do you think the product cycle is ready for consumer level? Are we ready to get normal humans to use this stuff?
J
Jeremy Allaire38:07
We're close, but not there yet. One of the biggest missing pieces is identity. For this to take hold, there need to be ways for people to interact with decentralized infrastructure with privacy-preserving forms of identity. That will be key to unlocking mainstream scale financial access. Many applications have nothing to do with money. The hurdle of people needing to understand seed phrases and private keys is too high. There are interesting projects like smart contract wallets (Argent) with guardian models using multi-factor identity to create an easier user experience. We're close.
H
Host39:54
What is the missing feature for normal humans that identity is useful for? Just identifying me as an individual or recovery of my keys?
J
Jeremy Allaire40:09
Part of it is to get DeFi and broader global interoperable peer-to-peer payments and general payment acceptance. When you get to mainstream scale, people want to deal with real humans. The legacy way is closed loops: card issuers, credit card networks, PayPal, Square. Public chains and public chain-based financial applications are completely open loops. It won't be acceptable to not have some way for an Amazon to verify with a zero-knowledge proof that someone is a valid KYC individual without knowing who they are. A DeFi protocol accessed by institutional market participants may want to cryptographically prove using zero-knowledge proofs that they're interacting with other institutions without knowing who they are. On a DEX like Serum, it's powerful. If you could put tokenized instruments on there, hedge funds would love to trade on decentralized infrastructure with no counterparty risk. From a legal perspective, they'll want various forms of proof. That's a key piece needed, which can also enable simple ways for digital wallets to share value without giving out identity handles, while knowing each user has been KYC'd. New standards on public chains are needed to unlock and make things more usable.
H
Host43:32
Austin, you said there was some news that broke. Jeremy, this kind of broke while we were on the call. It doesn't have to do with Solana, but it's really cool. I wanted to get your opinion on this live. It announced that Circle is teaming up with Tala to work with Visa to help get crypto payments adoption in emerging markets. I'm going to drop the link in the chat. Do you want to expand on this?
J
Jeremy Allaire43:59
Absolutely. Tala is building a payment application experience that leverages USDC as settlement in a wide range of emerging markets. It's attached to Visa credentials, so every Tala wallet holder has a Visa credential. The important thing is part of the work we started with Visa when we announced our partnership in December. They're interested in a world where people can make payments to each other all over the world using USDC. People who receive it, especially in emerging markets where they might not want to hold local currency, are more interested in holding a digital dollar. If I'm in Argentina and have a Tala wallet, I can receive USDC from anyone, send and receive it peer-to-peer, and it's attached to a Visa credential so I can make a purchase online or at a restaurant. I'm essentially paying with USDC, but the Visa network is handling and facilitating that. Instead of a bank account, it's just USDC. Visa has taken a step further: the Tala wallet user presents USDC to pay, and Tala can settle with Visa using USDC itself, without needing to convert it back into legacy fiat and go through SWIFT. Visa can just say, here's my USDC address, send me the amount owed.
H
Host46:27
Is that API to settle with Visa via USDC open to anyone?
J
Jeremy Allaire46:35
It's not meaning it's open to anyone. Crypto.com is also setting up and doing this. The issuer of the card, whether it's Tala or Crypto.com, gets an instruction on where to settle. In the Visa net system, typically you'd wire funds to a bank account, taking T+3. Now it can be multiple times a day: send this much USDC to Visa's USDC address. It's pretty cool.
H
Host47:32
That is really cool. The next baby step seems like issuing those IOUs on chain.
J
Jeremy Allaire47:44
Absolutely. All these wallets around the world that are innovative allow people to pay each other with USDC. Businesses can open a wallet and take payments directly. We'll see that happening a lot more in the coming years.
H
Host48:15
Is a bank account required to work with this? For the user, do you need a bank account to get into this program?
J
Jeremy Allaire48:26
No, that's the beauty. You can get a Tala wallet as a user in one of these countries where it's available, get it through the App Store, and then you get a Visa credential attached to it. You get a virtual card, and I think they're doing a physical card as well. People can send you digital currency, and you have it. You can effectively take credit. You have a credit account with Visa that you can settle with USDC. Your Tala wallet is a credit card in a sense. Actually, I think Tala is a debit instrument, not a credit instrument. It's more like someone sends me money or I purchase digital currency and put it in this wallet. If you open a checking account, it's empty. This is like opening a digital currency account, and you need to get funds into it. Maybe you're working on a token project and they'll pay you in USDC.
H
Host49:48
This is pretty cool. It seems like it moves at a glacial pace, but every one of these steps opens up a thousand new doors.
J
Jeremy Allaire49:59
A little over a year ago, we used to keep track of exchanges that had USDC and also had local currencies, so you could get from USDC into Brazilian real or whatever. In the last year, that has exploded. Exchanges offer services to people in 200 countries, with USDC support and local currency connectivity in almost 30 different currencies. That means there's a settlement path to get from dollars to local bank accounts and local currencies in all these places, happening organically. That's just the start. People will build abstractions on top and realize they can get funds to an Indian bank account in three minutes, super cheap, using these settlement paths. There's a lot more work to come.
H
Host51:20
It seems obvious that any system today using USDC that is KYC'd once, once merchants start accepting that as credit cards, they can issue the USDC they have on credit for the user and deal with settling later at some interest rate. All of a sudden you have a credit system.
J
Jeremy Allaire51:49
That can definitely happen.
H
Host51:53
That's super cool. I wouldn't be surprised if the entrenched Visas of the world get blindsided by this much faster than they think.
J
Jeremy Allaire52:06
The beauty of all this is the open internet, public protocols, developer innovation. People are creating and building on this as open technology. It has multiplier effects, compounding effects, network effects. There are so many degrees of freedom for people to build that things can happen really fast. It feels glacial sometimes, but things start to happen and people wonder where it came from. Banks and financial institutions are looking at USDC and wondering where it came from. They thought it was a toy. People are waking up that this is here to stay.
H
Host53:06
In your mind, is decentralization a critical component of this? Does the network it's running on have to be decentralized?
J
Jeremy Allaire53:17
Absolutely. Is decentralization important to the internet? It is the essence of the internet. IP is decentralized. It has to be resilient from any control by any corporation or government. It needs that level of decentralization to be broadly useful to humanity. It's deeply foundational. If the underlying infrastructure isn't decentralized, we're not making progress. Apps and services on top will be on a spectrum of decentralization, but the underlying protocols like Solana are making great progress in building decentralization. Your architecture is designed to achieve a great deal of decentralization based on HPC and bandwidth adoption. That's critical.
H
Host54:34
That's great to hear because we're deep in the trenches connecting Ethernet cables. Sometimes you have to understand if there's a point to all of it.
J
Jeremy Allaire54:51
One of the things, and I know we're going to wrap up in a minute, is that Dante Disparte just joined Circle as Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy. He and I have been talking about educating government leaders around the world that decentralized blockchains are strategic, even from a national security perspective. It's critical for this to be decentralized. You need infrastructure resilient from nation-state attack vectors that is not controllable in many ways. That's beneficial even at that level. If you have cryptography, fault tolerance, and persistence, and your financial systems run on top of that, it's really hard to hack. The legacy recordkeeping and fiduciary infrastructure has so many flaws that affect society and fundamental civil rights. There's a lot of work to do, but I'm cautiously optimistic about bringing policy makers to realize this is ultimately a better world we're building.
H
Host56:47
On that note, it's really awesome to have you join us for this chat. I hope the folks listening are inspired to go build the next corporate structure smart contract engine. If you're building stuff that has to do with USDC, or have ideas for a non-token equity startup, reach out to us. Reach out to Circle, we'll support you.
J
Jeremy Allaire57:17
Absolutely.
H
Host57:20
All right, great to hang out, great to chat. Thanks Jeremy. You can also submit your project to the hackathon. Jeremy is one of the leading judges, so we can fast track and make sure you get some initial funding. For everyone watching, we dropped Jeremy's Twitter link in here. Go follow him and post a screenshot, and we'll give one or two T-shirts away. He needs to get 200 followers or else no one's getting anything. Thanks for joining us Jeremy, this was awesome. We appreciate you taking the time.