Jeremy Allaire - Creating the Internet Financial System - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

good morning um super psych to be here uh I want to walk through a few high level things that really will bring you up to speed on the state of the usdc economy and the as the tagline says here the usdc economy today is strong it's been an extraordinary number of years in the growth of usdc usdc launched just around six years ago and it has grown now to support over $16 trillion of onchain transactions which is incredible and if you've been paying attention to social media as of late you'll have seen that stablecoin transactions onchain stable coin transactions have decoupled from crypto trading and so we're really seeing stable coin take hold as the killer app of transactions in the blockchain space um we've seen a lot of scaling not just in the number of transactions but you know in other key areas usdc is now available on 15 different blockchain networks we just announced yesterday that usdc is launching onu as well which will be the 16th it's available in hundreds of countries 35 billion in circulation which has continued to grow this year and cctp which is a really critical building block for developers who are trying to build useful applications that span all of these different blockchain infrastructures has done 16 or 12.6 billion in volume but I just want to drill into that a little bit more when you look at this space today it's a fragmented space The Innovation that's happening in layer ones layer 2os app chains is causing this proliferation of block space and the environments where people are building different types of apps our belief is that that is only going to continue and you're seeing these app app chain sort of stacks on top of layer 2 architectures and the bottom line is that end users whether you're making a peer-to-peer payment or you're going to play a game or you're going to participate in a prediction Market or you're going to you know do something else on a blockchain you actually don't care what blockchain it is um unless it's like you're you're using it because you you own it but um but you don't really care and what you care about is a seamless experience and we saw that that fragmentation was was causing a lot of issues locked assets Capital inefficiency Security vulnerabilities and so we set out to build a protocol cctp which launched just over a year ago and now a accounts for approximately 85% of all cross-chain usdc traffic so cctp has become the essential building block for anyone building in a multi-chain world and and and you know given the role of of usdc in the broader onchain ecosystem this is really really critical we're doing a lot more with this we'll be having some really exciting announcements around this in the near future but we view this layer this interoperability layer as a really critical and Powerful part of how we make stable coins ubiquitous and usable in every kind of application uh on the internet I also want to touch on um just a a a drill down into part of what makes usdc so special which is it's the most transparent liquid and Safe digital Dollar in the world and there's a few things just to touch on here and some of you may already know some of this but it's it's really important to touch on the first is you can see on the left this is the balance sheet of usdc and usdc you know nearing 36 billion right now it's cash that is held with several of the largest global systemically important banks in the world those are two big to fail banks with effective back stop of the governments with banks that are custodians of cash and the remainder is in treasury or treasury repo uh all short duration um the safest most liquid assets in the world but not just is this the asset mix it's how we disclose it the circle Reserve fund which is issued by Black Rock and is is an SEC supervised fund gives daily transparency into every single instrument in the circle Reserve so you can have full confidence there's no one wondering what's there it's transparent it's regulated it's and it's visible to everyone but you don't just have to take our word usdc we report on minting redemptions asset flows on a daily weekly and monthly basis no one else does that most importantly and other firms in the industry will say you can't get a big four auditor to audit your company in the space that is simply not true Circle has been audited by tou for years and they provide regular attestations uh to the the an assurance around this so most transparent liquid and Safe digital Dollar in the world and that's critical as people want to build all kinds of applications on top of this really critical Market infrastructure that's the usdc dimension I want to talk for a minute about what we describe as the circle stable coin Network circle is building a platform and network utility based business our stablecoin network is all of the pieces of software all of the end user applications all of the blockchain infrastructure all the liquidity providers on and off ramps and all the pieces that make this work as a coherent uh Global Network and at the center of that is our core platform and that's not just the digital asset usdc or EC we've been scaling out public blockchain infrastructure our stable coin protocol cctp and we're going to be launching more public chain infrastructure that's useful to any developer any user in the world it's the liquidity infrastructure and the banking infrastructure that exists now with 247 create redeem of usdc in the US Europe Brazil Mexico Singapore Hong Kong and more coming uh providing that infrastructure is part of the platform that we're providing to the rest of the world to build on and then increasingly we're building app services on top of this our programmable wallets that allow developers to bring to Market multi-chain apps that safely use usdc on top of the circle platform is now a partner ecosystem and that partner ecosystem is literally thousands of companies many of whom may be in the room here today that are building on an integrating usdc and circles platform across cross an incredible array of use cases and geographies and all of that combined serves users and users businesses Etc everywhere in the world building what we believe will become the largest and most widely used stablecoin Network in the world um there's always a lot of talk about use cases in crypto and uh we talk about that a lot with stable coins specifically we are seeing a proliferation in the use cases of stable coins across not just digital asset trading where usdc is is a critical critical uh piece of the infrastructure but in tokenization in consumer payments in traditional Capital markets bringing those assets on chain um in store value uh with some of the largest companies in the world so we're seeing those novel use cases Drive utility and there's a lot of talk right now about um moving from infrastructure to Consumer applications and we're really passionate about seeing Technologies like usdc become visible and usable with with global scale retail applications where people don't even necessarily know that they're using usdc and I'm really excited today to bring up an amazing uh partner and and Company who who's working with us and talk about some of the things that we're doing together and so with that I'm going to introduce Shane coplan founder and CEO of poly Market come on up Shane how's it going thanks so much for having me yeah absolutely so um obviously thanks for coming and talking uh here today we've got a couple cool things to talk about but um maybe first just the the one minute elevator pitch on polym Market I'm sure everyone knows polym Market but but for those that don't exactly so poly Market is the world's largest prediction market and simply put the idea is people can bet or trade on the outcome of events and the idea behind that is that when you let people trade with one another on on the outcome of something you get price Discovery and that becomes the most accurate way to discern the likelihood uh so people can use poly market and they have they have you know adopted poly Market as a way to understand the likelihood of important events in real time awesome so you guys made a decision really early on when you started to build on usdc and you know and and I'm very great f for that um but I I'd love for you just take a moment to sort of say like why why is usdc the right thing for a platform like poly Market absolutely um so I think that if you think about the the the perfect stable coin and obviously there's the the decentralization maximalism stable coins but the perfect for Consumer applications you want to get the Perfect Blend of uh of the onchain properties of a stable coin where it's transparent and it's programmable as as well as the elements that are going to flirt with traditional finance and I think what usdc got perfectly right is it's the the blend of uh trustless and trustworthiness and when we were starting we were building poly Market very early on empirically usdc was the thing that people gravitated the most to in terms of it feeling trustworthy uh that also had all the all the properties of of a stable coin which was what was necessary for poly Market to work as an onchain application yeah super super super compelling so I know like going from where you are today to like your the future uh of of of these kinds of markets um like you want to make that uh work a lot more seamlessly for a lot more people all around the world I'm excited to announce that we've entered into an agreement uh to collaborate significantly more on adopting you know Circle new infrastructure uh cctp and other things that are going to streamline how usdc gets en enabled for your users but um just talk a little bit about the collaboration with circle and also like what do you what do you envision as like that end State for the kind of experience that's made possible by Building Together absolutely and and first of all thank you to you guys for being excellent partners and supportive and uh and always being there whenever whenever we need something and uh I think that if you if you you know take a step back the beauty of of what you guys have built with usdc and uh we're able to to be a beneficiary of as as a as a product that's built on top of it uh is you guys have have shown that you can be the bridge between the two worlds you could say trafi and and onchain and uh and it's exciting because the more and more work that you guys put towards getting you say about the the the the terminal flow which I I really do believe is like as close to Apple pay as possible yeah as close to these traditional P2P payments apps that are as click as just clicking a button um if you can go and get that right and you can pave the way by engaging uh with with Regulators all around the world and and and doing what what's necessary in order to make that happen in a in a compliant fashion uh that also gets people into these on train applications things like poly Market will be able to one maintain transparency uh and being an onchain globally accessible application that everyone can can verify and uh on the on the flip side it'll still be as frictionless as things that we're used to and that's that's the that's the the golden the Golden Ratio there so I'm excited to be be part of the part of the Endeavor well it's super cool love building together thank you for joining excited for the next pH of the collaboration as well take care thanks Shane so I want to compl conclude with a few like highle thoughts about where we're going with all this and um the phrase that I like to use is that we're building the internet Financial system and that internet Financial system is going to be entirely built onchain and we're we're still in the very early stages of this um when you think about the maturation of this infrastructure stable coins blockchains as legal infrastructure for money is just coming into being right now but as we envision out we envision a world where increasingly an enormous percentage of what is payment utility that we think of today for users in businesses and in financial applications will move on chain as payment utility moves on chain and more currencies become stable coin currencies we're going to see the development of onchain FX markets that are as efficient or even more efficient uh than existing FX markets and that provide direct and real-time settlement across these in programmable and composable ways and we're already seeing some of that happen today we're going to see organizations obviously already a dow or a startup can operate their entire treasury on chain with a product like safe or many other uh products that are being built up like that but the benefits of using your working capital holding your treasury assets and doing those all on chain are going to become clear to more and more companies and in the future I believe just like every company is online every company will be onchain with their with their with their Treasury and so that movement into treasury management which then in turn as we have payment utility and capital held in these ways on chain that's going to lead to an explosion in onchain credit and I believe that in the next 10 years credit intermediation that is entirely intermediated using onchain smart contracts using risk management that's verifiable to the whole world uh and I'm not just talking about margin borrowing on crypto assets I'm talking about traditional forms of credit unsecured credit real world credit for real economic growth and investment will move onchain and will benefit from the kind of Market structures that we can build in this environment we're already seeing today other forms of intermediation happening onchain AI agents are going to transact increasingly and literally as new models come into existence like the o1 model from GPT this last week we are rapidly approaching a world where agents are conducting more work on our behalf and agents are interacting with other agents with speed with velocity and scale we don't as a h as a as an economy have an infrastructure for a world of agentic economic activity at scale around the world and we believe that blockchains and stable coins are going to be a critical part of that world of how the agent-based economic system is going to work and we're already experimenting with that I'm going to be showing some cool stuff at another event later this week on that um and you're seeing more and more products and sdks coming out around this use I think 2025 is going to be a very big year for that um onchain Commerce and onchain corporations um is is speaking to a couple of specific ideas in a world where payment utility basically becomes a commodity free service on the internet built on stable coins and blockchains and corporations are holding value uh on chain for their everyday operations um Commerce itself which is not just transactions it's the economic Arrangements that happen between people and businesses and between businesses and each others are going to be intermediated on chain intermediated through software and smart contracts and an increasing number of the contracts that we have have that sustain uh our our organizations today are also going to become onchain we're going to move from an offchain offline world of the intermediation of contracts to an onchain world of that and ultimately I believe that will lead us to a world where onchain corporations become the uh the typical configuration and I don't have a time frame for this but just like organizations in the 9s first began to get online because they thought hey this is this new environment where I could maybe put a brochure or take a customer question um now when we look at organizations today a huge number of organizations fundamentally operate online similarly I believe that many of the largest most successful highest velocity highest output corporations in the world will be exclusively on chain and so all of these things are building together and we're in the very early stages of all this taking place but it's an exciting time to be building and really grateful to be able to share uh all this with you today thank you