Exclusive Interview with CIRCLE Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire | KBW2023

Asia has been at the Forefront of the adoption of digital currency digital assets blockchain really for as long as this industry has existed uh and so when when we look at the demand uh for everything from usdc to web3 technology uh the most dynamic Market in the world uh today is the Asian market and so for us in terms of Our Own interational expansion uh you know we're we're investing an enormous amount in in people in technology in Partnerships uh to to Really scale and and grow Circle in [Music] Asia so our primary focus has been how can we use usdc to build the largest and most widely used stable coin Network in the world and usdc has achieved a lot and is growing but there more things that we can do to help grow the use of stable coins in the world so we've been introducing other Technologies and other products to really help with that uh the first uh is new protocols like the cross-chain transfer protocol which allows users to be able to very seamlessly move uh stable coins like usdc across the many different blockchains that exist layer one blockchains layer two chains and to provide a kind of portability layer uh for digital dollars so it's kind of a companion to usdc but a really important one that helps increase the safety uh and and the usability and user improve the user experience of moving around these digital dollars now we also really want to see um companies that want to build applications that use web3 technology we want to support them in doing that more easily the more consumer applications Financial applications e-commerce applications that that use web 3 the more demand there's going to be for things like stable coins in the world so we recently rolled out um the the first set of of products in our Circle web 3 Services product line it's our kind of Amazon web services for web3 apps it's a developer first platform and uh allows a developer to very easily uh integrate and launch web3 wallet technology into their apps to deal directly with self- custody uh and it tries to abstract away and simplify the use of of stable coins as a payment and settlement technology as well so that's a really important part of helping um Enterprises consumer companies and just developers more generally build web3 apps uh that are safe and easy to use Circle has always invested heavily in compliance and in regulatory work and in engagement with policy makers around the world that's been a founding principle of the company uh since we started 10 years ago so we're a widely regulated company uh we're regulated in the united states in the United Kingdom in the EU in Singapore um and we continue working with policy makers in establishing new rules around stable coins and digital assets uh as a company uh we have a very large investment in compliance risk management information security and all the kind of operational um infrastructure that's needed to be a global scale uh Financial Market infrastructure company so it's it's been a huge area of investment for us and I think it's one of the reasons why Circle as a brand is so clearly associated with trust and integrity and compliance we think we're at the beginning stages of the development of a internet-based financial system where the building blocks of the financial system are actually built into software and encoded into the kind of protocols and software of the internet and that's going to be a huge uh a huge change we believe that um the kind of digital economy itself is going to be a bigger and bigger part of the real economy and that that digital economy is going to increasingly depend on an internet native Financial system so we think about our role as providing one of the really critical building blocks of that internet Financial system which is taking traditional money uh and expressing it in in a in a digital currency form and making that accessible through open infrastructure open protocols uh and and developer platforms and and really enabling you know the kind of money Lego bricks uh uh to exist and to allow people to build with those um and we obviously want to continue to contribute to maybe other parts of the infrastructure that are necessary to build an internet Financial system um but um as I said I think we're still very early in that uh when we think about the eventual total addressable market for an internet Financial system um you know we we believe eventually it's in the many trillions of dollars and so it's still a small industry it's still a small these are small businesses relative to what they can be uh but certainly um an exciting time for them there's so much Innovation happening right now I think um in the fundamental blockchain infrastructure itself we're continuing to see higher performance more secure more accessible blockchain infrastructure we're seeing new um innovations that provide abstractions uh that will simplify how end users can onboard into this new technology where they don't need to know about some of the um complexities of things like managing private keys or their custody uh where they don't need to even know what a blockchain is or that they're even using a blockchain um and then they can you know interact and work with web 3 and the in the same kind of experience that they have working with web 2 so I think we're seeing um very significant improvements in the core infrastructure and standards on top of that infrastructure which are going to allow this to work at scale in a cost-efficient way and in particular in a way which is safe and userfriendly uh and I think those are all things that are happening right now and I think by the end of next year we'll really have crossed the chasm uh into a new landscape uh where uh apps that are building on web 3 and and using this infrastructure uh start to become you know much larger scale from a mainstream perspective