Jeremy Allaire - Mainstream Adoption of Stablecoin Payments Has Arrived - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Hello there. It's great to be here today. I'm I'm super excited to uh talk to you guys about what Circle is working on, our vision, the progress of stable coins on a global basis, and and really the next layer of Circle that we're introducing to expand mainstream adoption of of stable coins in the global payment system. Um, as just noted, I co-founded this company in 2013. And when we founded the company back then, so much of the technology that is available and robust and here today didn't exist.

But the the basic idea that uh that we had was that it would become possible to build a protocol for dollars on the internet that we could actually issue a dollar digital currency that was a fully reserved form of money, not a fractionally reserved form of money. And we could make it available on open permissionless blockchain networks and provide that protocol in the same way that protocols had uh made data and communications and information widely available. And while that wasn't technically possible at the time, we believed it would become possible and that we could deliver on that vision. And that once that became possible that basically storing and moving value would become a commodity-free service on the internet. the marginal cost of storing and moving value would effectively go to zero and money velocity would increase in the real economy.

And if we could see that happen, we could literally build a world where we believe that we could help to increase global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. That was the founding mission of the company. We've been doggedly pursuing that ever since and making tremendous progress. So, a lot of you all here are already obviously very familiar with stable coins. Um, but stable coins can mean a lot of different things.

So for us, this is fully reserved regulated onchain representations of fiat money that connect the existing financial system to the new internet financial system that scale with the scale of blockchain networks that actually provide through programmability completely new utility for money that's being invented by the day. This is obviously experiencing rapid growth and critically regulatory clarity all around the world where stable coins are becoming legal cash equivalent electronic money everywhere which is extraordinary. Now this is growing fast. Uh Visa publishes data about some of this. The the percentage of transactions of that they deem to be real economic transactions uh that that are done in stable coins is already close to 20% of the volume of card networks.

Stable coin supply is forecasted to grow incredibly rapidly. City just came out last week with a forecast of a base case of 1.6 trillion in 2030 and a and a and a and a a bull case of over $3.5 trillion dollars of stablecoin money in circulation. That is extraordinary.

It's one of the largest markets that has ever existed on the internet. So this market opportunity is enormous. the the the the TAM of legal electronic money we know today is over $90 trillion globally. Approximately $60 trillion of that TAM is cash and non-interest bearing demand deposits, electronic deposits. That's $60 trillion of TAM available to stable coin money today.

The other part of the TAM is the actual utility of that money. all of the payment utilities, capital markets utilities, crossber settlement utilities that represent trillions and trillions of dollars of revenue that can be transformed and rebuilt on this internet financial system using stable coin infrastructure. These are two extraordinarily large total addressable markets. I believe they're the largest TAMs that have ever been addressed by the internet today. So five years into the company, the technology actually made it possible to deliver a protocol for dollars on the internet.

And we launched USDC in 2018, fulfilling that original vision that we had. And we took a very particular approach when we launched this. We looked at it as a as a market neutral infrastructure, as a protocol that developers could build on top of. We built a stablecoin network by working with developers, the most innovative developers in the onchain ecosystem, wallet developers, others in this global ecosystem, built a liquidity network and built what is one of the largest stable coin networks in the world. That's an extraordinary uh extraordinary accomplishment.

Now, since 2020, in the last 5 years, that growth has been tremendous and it's accelerating at a at a rapid rapid clip. USDC is the fastest growing global stable coin. Over the last approximately 15 to 16 months, since the very beginning of 2024, USDC has grown over 150%. This is already out of date. Um, has grown over 150%, more than three times the growth rate of our largest competitor.

Over 600 million people today can reach in their pocket, take out a familiar application that they already use and and access and use USDC. We want that to be billions over the next uh over the next, you know, two or three years. In Q1 alone, we saw over $6 trillion of onchain transactions using USDC. That's over 600% growth on a year-over-year basis. Stable coin payment volumes are growing extraordinarily fast.

The utility is is taking hold. We're going through this early adopter to mainstream moment. And it's it's happening and it's and it's one of the most I think exciting developments not just in crypto but in the entire global economic system. So we've built this stablecoin network. We've built it by working with all of you by working with liquidity providers, exchanges, uh payment service providers, custodians, enduser products, banking partners around the world.

We've built this incredible infrastructure that so many people can rely on and build on. We've worked with governments around the world to ensure that this is robust, compliant, and safe and trustworthy. Huge investments that we've made since the founding of the company. Today, I want to talk about the next layer of Circle, Circle Payments Network. We've built this infrastructure over the past six to seven years.

all the money issuance, the global banking infrastructure, the multi-chain infrastructure to bring these protocols to all of the best and fastest growing and most innovative blockchain networks in the world. We built liquidity infrastructure. We built developer platforms and last week we announced the introduction of circle payments network. This is really fulfilling the original vision of the company to increase global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. Everything is converging to make this possible right now.

The robustness of blockchain infrastructure, the legal and regulatory clarity to make this usable as money in the global economic system and a huge number of firms including many people in the room today that can intermediate the interaction with stable coins on these global networks. Circle Payments Network is an onchain payments network for global money movement. We're taking some of the most critical problems in moving money globally and we're rebuilding that in an onchain world. We have money movement networks like the correspondent banking system and Swift. We have money movement networks that are closed loop that are used for retail payments.

All these have a number of things in common. They're based on membership. They're based on network rules. They're based on governance. We're introducing that for this global money movement network built entirely on stable coins and stable coin infrastructure.

Last week in announcing this there were over 30 companies who are already committed to being design partners and launching with circle payments network including banks, neo banks, payment service providers, crossber payments companies, B2B companies, exchanges, brokerages, wallets, almost every type of company you can imagine are committed to launching on circle payments network including five global systemically important banks. People are going to build on stable coins to move money globally and it's happening. The first transactions on the commercially flowing will happen in May and we'll expand from there. Now we also launched a white paper, the CPN white paper. I would encourage all of you to download it on circle.

com. You can read about it and that really gives you a clear view of what it is that we're trying to build and the road map for what we're executing on. We envision this onchain payments network to be used for every form of digital payment in the world. We believe that it can be used in institutional payments, in forex settlements, in treasury services, in payouts, in capital markets transactions. It can be used in business payments, in trade finance, in crossber settlements, in AI payments.

We believe it can be used in consumer payments, for retail transactions, consumer to consumer transactions. All of these use cases will ultimately be supported. The the payments network is modeled on a on an approach where financial intermediaries can join the network for end user and intermediate for end users and businesses uh providing access to the underlying infrastructure of CPN. CPN includes a set of orchestration services that will orchestrate between all of the counterparties on the network facilitating an actual marketplace in crossber transactions. So a a a sender is able to find the best route, the best cost, the best delivery SLA with partners that are connected to this in every region of the world.

So it's it it's a marketplace for crossber settlements as well as an extensible model for service providers that provide services to the network and we have a number of service providers that are already helping with that initial launch. Some of the categories are included here. Now when you think about this broad vision we're not trying to solve everything all at once. the the initial focus for circle payments network and CPN is transforming crossber payments now we've been seeing this for years stable coins are already used in crossber payments and consumer transactions and in business transactions but that's been accelerating we've been seeing that in our stable coin network today we've been seeing more and more of these crossber flows but there are fundamental problems that need to be solved to bring this to mainstream scale We need to have a way to ensure that the transactions are between known counterparties. We need to have a way that uh the the actual process of discovering a currency cross and the delivery uh SLAs's for for delivering value not just in the stable coin itself but into the destination currencies and bank accounts around the world.

We need mechanisms to do all of that. The this first deployment of CPN provides those mechanisms in a standardized way through standardized interfaces that any developer uh can implement and integrate. So crossber payments is an enormous space. There's well over hundred trillion dollars in crossber payments already annually and we're going to try and solve this in a seamless way where the users on these services don't even necessarily know they're using stable coins. It it allows this infrastructure to be used in the background or in the foreground.

So a user on either side can start with a stable coin and end with a stable coin or they can start with fiat and end with fiat. It gives flexibility uh across these. So it's a very powerful model. We're very excited to see that get started. Now the other thing that we've always envisioned since the founding of the company is this idea of the programmability of money and already today USDC is widely used as programmable money.

The entire DeFi ecosystem is heavily uh uh built around the programmability of things like USDC and that programmability is is driving innovation already today. But there's never been, we believe there has never been a truly open, extensible and modular payments network in the world. Blockchain technology, the programmability of smart contracts gives us the opportunity to create a modular and extensible payments network in a way that hasn't existed. If you're a developer today and you have an idea for something you want to add to the Visa network, you can't just go build something and deploy it on the Visa network. If you're a third party and you want to add capabilities to the international correspondent settlement system, you can't just go build a module to go do that.

CPN is designed around extensibility. In our white paper, we describe a set of firstparty modules that Circle will be launching. Modules for refundable transactions. We recently introduced something called the refund protocol. modules for uh uh confidential transactions which are critical if a business is making payments and needs to ensure that they can compliantly deliver that without uh revealing the details of their transactions to the entire world.

We will introduce first-party modules, but developers can build thirdparty modules. And we'll create a way for developers to build these using open blockchain protocols, smart contract protocols, and deploy those as services that members on this network can take advantage of. So, we're really excited about the opportunity that this creates. And this gets to the core of the the economic philosophy of what we do. If you think about what we've built with USDC and the stable coin network already today, we've always taken what I call a big tent mentality, which is that we want to build something that the entire ecosystem can build on and get value from.

In some respects, USDC is a global public utility for dollar transactions on the internet and everyone benefits from that and it delivers incredible value for so many people today. But we're taking that same philosophy with CPN. What we're doing is we're introducing an economic model where the participants on the network can generate their own fee revenue and scale out. And whether you're a thirdparty service provider building a a new module for the network or you're an intermediary that's originating payments or a destination that's receiving payments or both, we're creating an economic model for participants to generate new income streams. And we believe that when we think about this total addressable market of the money utility, what I showed earlier, the trillions of dollars that of of of revenue that exists today in in utilities that move money, we believe that we can do it better together.

We can build an ecosystem together. we can build something where the product is 10x better for the businesses and the users that take advantage of it and the economics are ultimately 10x better as well. That's the opportunity. That's why so many of us have gotten into this industry in the first place is because we actually believe that we can build a new internet financial system that's better. So, this is a step in that direction.

It's something that we're incredibly excited about. there's going to be more uh that that uh is available and to learn about. I encourage you to look at it. So, we've been on this journey for 12 years with that founding mission to increase global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. We were told 12 years ago that it was a pipe dream.

We were told that governments would never allow this. We were told that it was uneconomical. We were told that the technology would never work. Bitcoin was seven transactions per second. There was no extensibility.

There was no programmability. We believed that this technology would develop. We believed that policymakers would learn about this technology, would adapt to this technology. We believed that full reserve money in the form of of fiat digital currencies would be a better form of money and that would become acceptable and would ultimately become acceptable in the mainstream global financial system. And we believe that from the super national bodies to the central banks to the technology firms and others that that would all become possible.

And we've we've built on this and we've worked on this and I think it's an extraordinary time for that. There are there are exciting milestones ahead for Circle. I think there's incredibly exciting milestones ahead for the entire stable coin industry. This is a period of incredible innovation. Um, and I believe in the in the coming weeks and months, we will see uh federal stable coin rules in the United States that will create the basis where dollar digital currencies like USDC can actually become part of the global financial system.

So, there's an enormous amount ahead. I'm grateful for the ability to work with so many different people in the room as users, as developers, and and and third parties as well, and look forward to continuing to build together. Thank you.