"Founder of the First Stablecoin Stock": How I Went All in on Stablecoins 7 Years Ago

The world's second-largest stablecoin giant Circle is set to go public on the New York Stock Exchange tonight, marking the second native U.S. stock listing in the cryptocurrency industry after the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, in 2021. Four years ago, Coinbase's listing heralded the peak moment for Bitcoin, and now, four years later, coinciding with a new bull-bear cycle in cryptocurrency, Circle's listing showcases a new narrative in the crypto space—stablecoins.

In simple terms, stablecoins are the tokenization of the U.S. dollar, pegged to the dollar at a value of 1 token = 1 dollar. For a detailed interpretation of stablecoins, you can refer to "The Federal Reserve understood stablecoins three years ago."

Since the beginning of this year, the concept of stablecoins and the related RWA (Real World Assets on-chain) has significantly differed from previous years. The favorable policies for stablecoins in the U.S. and Hong Kong, combined with Wall Street's interest in RWA projects, represented by giants like BlackRock, and the influx of traditional money into stablecoins, have rapidly brought the concepts of RWA and stablecoins into the mainstream. Circle, which was not previously viewed as favorably, has seen its IPO valuation soar from $5.4 billion to around $7 billion, bolstered by the rush of BlackRock and Cathie Wood to purchase IPO shares.

The Bitcoin white paper defines Bitcoin as "a peer-to-peer electronic cash system." However, Bitcoin has long since become a financial commodity, and no one uses Bitcoin for payments anymore. The only asset that can currently function as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system is stablecoins, which is where the true potential of stablecoins lies.

Jeremy Allaire, the founder of Circle, recognized all of this seven years ago.

Below is a summary of Jeremy's narrative as organized by Rhythm BlockBeats.

The "Shovel Seller" of the Web 1.0 Era

In 1990, I began to engage with the internet, and what truly sparked my interest was the firsthand experience of the power of open networks, distributed systems, decentralized architectures, open protocols, and open-source software, which I often refer to as the "DNA of the internet."

During that time, I was also following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, deeply shocked by this structural change, and began to delve into technology, increasingly believing that the internet would change the world.

By 1994, the first graphical web browser technology was born. At that moment, I realized that we finally had software that could display content, applications, and various things on web pages, giving rise to the concept of "the web as an application platform."

So, my brother and I, along with some partners, founded Allaire Corporation and launched ColdFusion, the first commercial web programming language.

At that time, although there was Perl, and some people were writing dynamic page logic in C on web servers, ColdFusion truly made web application development simple and user-friendly—if you had an idea and about a thousand dollars, you could create an interactive web application that could be used in a browser.

In 1995, this was a significant breakthrough. With the rise of websites, e-commerce, and online content, we rode this wave. Allaire also developed a complete set of tools, and millions of developers worldwide used our software.

As the market matured, we successfully went public in early 1999.

It was a bit "alternative" at the time because we were a profitable public company—most companies were in a loss state when they went public during the internet bubble. But we were more like the "shovel sellers" of the Web 1.0 era, providing foundational tools for the entire industry.

After going public, we merged with Macromedia, which was also a giant in creating internet and content development tools. I became the CTO of the new company after the merger and began to promote the development of Flash applications. It was a very powerful software that allowed web pages to achieve more complex multimedia presentations and interactive experiences.

The "Couch Political Economist" Falls into the Crypto Rabbit Hole

Returning to the initial opportunity that brought me to the internet, I was originally studying international political economy, focusing on the comparison of various economic systems and political institutions, and was very interested in macro issues of the international economic system. Then I became excited about the internet, deeply attracted by the transformation in information transmission and software distribution brought about by these open networks.

During my time at Macromedia, as early as March 2002 (yes, 2002, not 2022), we integrated seamless video playback capabilities into Flash Player, making video playback ubiquitous on the internet.

For the first time, anyone could easily embed video into their browser. The explosion of YouTube was built on this technology—it was initially implemented based on Flash Player.

Later, I founded a company called Brightcove. The philosophy of Brightcove was still based on the underlying DNA of the internet: open networks, open protocols, and distributed systems.

My idea at the time was—could we enable any company or media organization to publish video and television content directly on the internet? Keep in mind that this was 2004, when broadband was just starting to emerge, Wi-Fi was just beginning, and there were no smartphones, yet people were already discussing the future of "connected devices."

One clear point was that I could see a future with a large number of connected devices, with Wi-Fi and mobile broadband, and video distribution would be completely liberated.

So we built an online video distribution system—essentially an "online television platform."

This was an extension of the capabilities of the internet: increasingly rich and more realistically achieving what people envisioned in Web 1.0, finally coming true in the Web 2.0 era, and Brightcove's business was very successful, ultimately going public in early 2012.

Why Found Circle?

The financial crisis of 2008 sparked reflections from my academic years, transforming me into a "couch political economist," voraciously reading various materials on the nature of money, central banking, the international monetary system, and fractional reserve banking. I was pondering "what's going on?" and also thinking about whether there could be a better monetary system. Is there a better way to construct the international financial system?

Of course, this wasn't the kind of thing where you wake up one day and say, "I want to start a company that disrupts the global monetary system." It was 2009 and 2010, and there were no realistic paths to achieve these ideas; I was just continuously researching.

But by 2012, shortly after Brightcove went public, I encountered cryptocurrency and dove headfirst into this rabbit hole.

Jeremy Allaire during his Brightcove days

I came from a technical and product background, and after entering this field from a technical perspective, I saw some shocking things: this was a true technological breakthrough.

Some computer science problems were solved, and these solutions were incredibly powerful. For the first time, I synchronized the Bitcoin blockchain on my laptop and completed a peer-to-peer transaction—entirely relying on open protocols over the internet. That moment felt like the first time the Mosaic browser opened a web page for me—I thought, "My God, this is the missing infrastructure of the internet!"

Next, my co-founders and I delved deeper into research, especially in the tech community at the time, where we encountered many discussions:

Aside from Bitcoin, could other types of digital assets be issued on such networks? Today we refer to these as "tokens" or "digital assets." Having previously worked on virtual machines and programming languages, I naturally participated in the discussions:

• How can we make these digital assets "programmable"?
• How can we achieve "programmable money"?
• How can we build smart contracts?

At that time, these ideas were merely concepts on napkins; some white papers had just emerged, but we were very clear that these would be realized—it was just a matter of time.

So we combined all these ideas with another question: how to build a more secure and open financial system? These thoughts converged into the only thing I could think about, and I became almost obsessed, ultimately deciding to found Circle.

Our original intention was to create a protocol for "money" similar to HTTP. Could we build an open protocol suitable for the dollar? This protocol would be open, programmable, and so on.

This was our vision ten years ago, and it has now come true, becoming a truly "killer application" in the crypto space. Although building this system took a long time, it has now reached a considerable scale, even though it is still in its early stages.

The Rise of USDC

In the spring of 2018, the crypto market experienced a significant downturn, and the entire industry fell into a severe winter, with almost the entire market plummeting. Our products, which were originally generating revenue and profits, either barely broke even or began to incur losses, leading us to burn cash at an alarming rate.

By 2019, at the depth of that winter, fundraising became extremely difficult. Meanwhile, our operating costs spiraled out of control, and cash was running low—if we didn't take action, we would face bankruptcy.

It was at this time that we officially launched USDC in October 2018.

A Gamble

In 2019, DeFi protocols began to widely adopt USDC, and the market showed early signs of product-market fit (PMF). Although the market was still highly volatile at that time, from a technical standpoint, Ethereum had matured enough to truly support these use cases, with MetaMask and other related products allowing developers to start using these tools effectively.

Despite the trading volume being small at that time, the developer community's acceptance of USDC was very high. We recognized this and realized that this was our company's original vision, our core, and what we truly wanted to do.

So, in a very short time, we quickly sold three business lines—we sold the Poloniex exchange, the Circle Trade OTC business, and the Circle Invest product aimed at retail investors, while also shutting down and liquidating our previously launched payment application.

By selling these assets, we obtained the urgently needed funds and conducted a thorough restructuring of the company. Some employees were transferred to these divested businesses, and the company underwent significant adjustments.

By the fall of 2019, we were once again on the brink of bankruptcy, but at the same time, USDC began to show early signs of vitality in the market. So we made the decision—to go all-in on USDC, committing all our energy to build a complete platform around it and promote its widespread adoption.

This was essentially a "gamble company" decision; at that time, USDC itself had not generated any revenue, and the entire company had very little income. But I was firmly convinced that the era of stablecoins had arrived, and they would ultimately become a core component of the global monetary system, with stablecoins being the most suitable monetary structure in the internet age.

We had the right product, and as long as we persisted, we would surely find the right path and create something valuable. So we pushed forward with all our might.

This was the first real major challenge in the development of USDC. Although we had faced many difficulties before, this moment was critical for the survival of the entire company. While USDC had already gained early growth momentum, it was still insufficient to support a scaled company.

We directed all company resources toward USDC, betting all our funds on it. I remember clearly that we officially announced this strategy in January 2020, when the homepage of Circle's official website was completely revamped into a massive billboard promoting "stablecoins as the future of the international financial system." The only operational button on the page was: "Get USDC." All other functions were removed.

Then, on March 10, 2020, we launched an upgrade to the Circle platform, completely revamping the USDC account system and introducing a new set of APIs to facilitate developers in seamlessly integrating banks, credit cards, and other payment systems for USDC deposits and withdrawals, with the entire platform built around USDC.

Just three days later, on March 13, the world entered lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Interestingly, USDC had already begun to grow in February 2020, even before our official launch. I believe this was because users in the Asian market had recognized the severity of the pandemic and began to react early.

During that time, a very complex intertwining phenomenon occurred: many people, due to distrust in their national financial systems, began to transfer funds into digital dollars; at the same time, governments around the world rolled out large-scale emergency stimulus policies, attempting to inject liquidity into the market to prevent the economy from falling into a "Great Depression."

Thus, we saw a highly coordinated super-loose policy emerge globally, leading to a massive influx of funds into the market. People sat at home with government-issued subsidy checks, pondering, "How should I use this money?"

During that period, the world also experienced a significant turning point—the digitalization process of society suddenly accelerated.

The concept of the metaverse began to gain popularity from that point, as people transitioned online overnight. All digital products experienced explosive growth. From Zoom (which became almost the representative company of that period) to home fitness company Peloton, to e-commerce, online retail, digital payments, and online marketplaces—almost every digital industry experienced a five-year level of growth acceleration during that phase.

At the same time, the adoption of blockchain technology and the digital asset market also entered an explosive phase.

The summer of 2020 was dubbed the "DeFi Summer," and USDC skyrocketed from a circulation of $400 million at the beginning of 2020 to $40 billion within a year, representing dramatic, explosive growth.

Stablecoin Market Capitalization Growth Curve

Preconditions for the Popularization of Stablecoins

In recent years, even just a year or two ago, people often asked, "How can this thing achieve true large-scale adoption?" My consistent answer has been: we need to solve three key issues. Of course, "we" here does not just refer to Circle, but the entire industry, requiring collective efforts to promote.

The first issue is infrastructure, which refers to the blockchain network itself.

My thinking model regarding blockchain networks is that they are like the "operating systems of the internet." What we need are higher-performance, higher-throughput operating system-like blockchain networks. Over the past few years, significant progress has been made in this area. We have now entered the era of "third-generation blockchain networks"—namely, high-performance Layer 1 public chains and Layer 2 scaling networks.

This means achieving higher transaction throughput, with the cost of a single transaction being extremely low, possibly less than a penny, even less than a cent.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong previously stated, "Transaction times are under one second, and costs are under a cent," and we have indeed largely achieved this state. The advancements in these high-performance networks are also driving the growth of the entire ecosystem. By lowering unit costs and marginal costs while increasing transaction speed—it's like transitioning from dial-up internet to broadband, from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

The second issue is network effects. Stablecoins like USDC are essentially network-type product platforms, where developers build applications based on them. The more applications that are integrated, the stronger the utility of the entire network; the more users who hold stablecoins, the greater the utility of the network, creating a positive feedback loop.

At a certain stage, developers will even realize that if their products do not support USDC, they may already be falling behind in competition. So once the infrastructure upgrade is complete, the network effects between users and developers will truly begin to take effect.

Next is the third issue, which is the so-called improvement in "usability," which is closely related to the infrastructure upgrade. Remember two or three years ago, if you wanted to use stablecoins, you had to first purchase them on a platform, then install a browser extension wallet, and to use the wallet, you had to buy Ethereum, pay expensive fees, and then transfer ETH to your self-custody wallet. The entire process took seven or eight minutes and was particularly cumbersome, making it completely unreasonable.

At that time, if someone asked, "Who would want to use this thing?" it was entirely understandable.

But now, you can directly access the wallet system through a web interface or mobile app, and the entire experience is like registering for WhatsApp, requiring perhaps just a phone number, facial recognition, or biometric code, without needing to remember seed phrases or deal with a bunch of complex settings.

All these changes combined are creating a favorable usage environment, making stablecoins easier to accept and use.

The final ultimate hurdle is government regulation.

The most exciting thing is that now, globally, from Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore to Europe, the UK, the UAE, and the U.S., almost all major jurisdictions are gradually introducing relevant laws that explicitly recognize stablecoins as legal electronic currencies and incorporate them into the formal financial system.

Once these laws are implemented, the use of stablecoins will expand from early crypto natives to a broader general population. Therefore, we believe that by the end of 2025, stablecoins are likely to become a widely legally integrated part of the global financial system.

Of course, we must also recognize that all of this is still in a very early stage. You can view the current state through Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" theory: we are like the process of leaping over that "chasm" in mid-air, not yet having truly landed, and still at risk of failure or falling. But I believe we will make it across.

We can see more and more institutions that I refer to as "FinTech-friendly banks," or "emerging digital banks (neobanks)," beginning to natively support the use of stablecoins. For example, Latin America's NuBank, Europe's Revolut, or brokerage applications like Robinhood.

This also includes large crypto companies like Coinbase and Binance, which together have over 400 million users. In a sense, they have already transformed into "financial super apps": you can store balances, receive salaries, link cards for spending, and the process of acquiring and using USDC has become very smooth.

We are indeed witnessing a trend—people are starting to view the "dollar" as a unit of value storage, but its underlying form is actually USDC.

Moreover, we are now collaborating with Visa and MasterCard, both of which have projects allowing card issuers to issue such cards: on the surface, they are Visa or MasterCard, but in actual transactions, they use stablecoins like USDC.

This model has emerged in large numbers in emerging markets, where users obtain a physical or virtual card through new bank-style digital wallet apps, linked to their stablecoin balances. Many people want to hold dollars, and these cards allow them to continue spending in traditional card networks, with the backend settlement done in USDC.

Even for these card issuers, the settlement funds they pay to Visa or MasterCard can now be completed directly in USDC. This means that USDC is effectively being used as a settlement channel between financial institutions and card networks, which is quite interesting in itself.

At the same time, we are also seeing changes on the merchant acquiring side, with companies like Worldpay, Checkout.com, Nuvei, and Stripe providing merchants with the option to settle in USDC.

Earlier this year, we saw a very cool example: Stripe co-founder John Collison, at their annual conference, made a "grand reveal" as he had in previous years, stating something like: "Crypto is back, but this time it's not Bitcoin; it's USDC, it's stablecoins."

He demonstrated a new feature in the Stripe Checkout product—this product allows merchants to directly embed Stripe's payment gateway into their websites or apps. In the demonstration, USDC was displayed alongside credit cards as a payment option, allowing merchants to choose to accept USDC.

Collison excitedly showcased the entire process on stage, saying, "This is how payments should be." In the demonstration, they used the Solana network, with real-time settlement and very low fees.

As the legal status of stablecoins becomes clearer, more and more financial institutions will view them as a foundational settlement layer.

For example, a merchant might say, "I want to accept USDC because I can receive money instantly and save on fees; it's a better choice for me."

On the user side, an increasing variety of terminal products are emerging—whether traditional banks, emerging digital banks, or crypto super apps, they are all creating a seamless experience that allows users to complete payments with just a QR code scan.

Another significant event I mentioned earlier this year on Twitter: iOS has begun to open NFC for third-party wallet use. This means that Web3 wallets may support "tap to pay" in the future, allowing users to complete payments at physical merchant terminals using wallets containing USDC.

Of course, achieving this requires cooperation from multiple parties, such as payment processors and acquirers supporting on-chain transactions, wallet developers integrating NFC functionality into their products, and approval from Apple.

However, all of this is already in the planning stages, and we expect to see larger-scale implementations by 2025, which is indeed an exciting development.

Favorable Policy Environment Continues

From the very first day Circle was founded, the philosophy has been to stand at the intersection of the traditional financial system and the new world of blockchain. To achieve this, the U.S. government clarified its legal stance as early as March 2013:

If you are a company that connects both the banking system and the virtual currency world, you fall under the category of "money transmitter," and you must register with the federal government, have a complete anti-money laundering program, and apply for licenses in every state with relevant legal requirements.

We were the first company in the crypto industry to obtain a full set of compliance licenses from the ground up. We were the first crypto company to receive an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license in Europe and the first to obtain the so-called "BitLicense" in New York—this was the first regulatory license specifically established for the crypto industry. For nearly a year after that, we were the only company holding this license.

We have always adhered to the principle of "regulation first," consistently choosing to take the "front door" route to ensure we have a sound and robust compliance system. By the way, it is precisely because of this compliance foundation that we can achieve another key goal: liquidity.

What is liquidity? It means you can truly create and redeem stablecoins, connect to real bank accounts, and use fiat currency to purchase and redeem stablecoins. If you are a dubious offshore company, no one is willing to open a bank account for you, and you simply cannot do any of this. You wouldn't even know where your bank is.

We were the first company to establish high-quality banking partnerships and brought in strategic partners like Coinbase to distribute USDC on a large scale at the retail level, allowing any ordinary user with a bank account to easily buy and redeem USDC. We also provide institutional-level services. In other words, from transparency, compliance, and regulatory frameworks to actual liquidity, we have achieved it all.

On the technical innovation front, we have also been exploring what else the protocol itself can do. We view USDC as a stablecoin network protocol and have been thinking about how to collaborate with developers to promote its integration and application. These fundamental principles are the reason we have come this far, and we continue to build, not just for the U.S. market.

In terms of payment stablecoins, significant work has already been done by various parties in the U.S. The "Payment Stablecoin Act" has matured considerably in my view, with bipartisan support in the House and active participation from Senate leadership. We have also seen high-level attention from the government, including the White House, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve. This topic has been prioritized by the government for several years.

(Note: On May 19, the U.S. Senate passed the "2025 U.S. Stablecoin Innovation Guidance and Establishment Act" (GENIUS Act) by a vote of 66 to 32, attempting to provide federal regulation for dollar-pegged stablecoins.)

Many key issues, such as how to ensure financial safety and soundness while supporting private innovation, how the Federal Reserve should play a core role (establishing standards for dollar stablecoins), and how to provide pathways for state issuers and regulators, similar to the current "dual banking system"—you can be a state-chartered bank or a federally-chartered bank—are all being advanced.

The financial system itself is a highly regulated industry; the energy system is highly regulated, the transportation system is highly regulated, the aerospace system is highly regulated, and drug production is also highly regulated. In fact, most key technologies or infrastructures in society are under intensive regulation.

The software industry may have been an exception over the past thirty years, as it has faced little regulation. But now, if you are doing something particularly large and cutting-edge, such as artificial intelligence, hardware combined with autonomous driving, or building a global digital currency system—these areas have begun to intersect with those traditionally highly regulated industries, and they have a significant potential impact on society, making regulation reasonable.

I do not believe that "innovation should not be regulated." If something becomes extremely important to society, it needs to be matched with a framework of contractual spirit and social responsibility, which is a reality that exists. Regulation can vary in intensity—global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) are subject to far more regulation than a local community bank.

So if what we are doing becomes systemically important in the future, not only will our relationship with the U.S. government change, but our relationships with other governments will also change accordingly. Of course, these are all very distant matters, and we are not there yet.

What we are truly focused on now is how to realize our vision for an internet financial system, how to make "open, programmable, composable money" a reality. We hope this innovation can truly take root and not be stifled. To achieve this, it also requires policymakers and governments to provide more room for innovative freedom—just as the internet once gained in other fields.

Circle's Business Model

I believe Circle is one of the most transparent financial institutions in history. If you observe a bank, an insurance company, or other types of financial institutions, you will find that they do not publicly disclose product operations in real-time, nor do they disclose basic data from their balance sheets daily, which is precisely what we have been doing.

How do we achieve this? First, when we receive dollars, these dollars are pre-deposited into reserve accounts before minting USDC. These reserve funds are established as segregated accounts for the benefit of customers, as required by law. Laws and regulations mandate that we must keep these funds segregated, and only after completing the segregation can we issue electronic currency instruments, with the ownership of the funds belonging to the customers. Therefore, from legal, regulatory to operational aspects, we strictly comply.

How to Ensure Reserve Safety

So, what do these reserves consist of? Currently, the reserves are mainly divided into two parts:

About 90% of the reserves are held in an account called the Circle Reserve Fund. This is very important. We want anyone interested in USDC to clearly see the composition of these reserves within a regulated structure. Therefore, we partnered with BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, to establish the Circle Reserve Fund.

This fund is essentially a government bond fund, which can also be understood as a government money market fund, with the sole purpose of holding USDC's reserve assets. It is issued in the form of securities, regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and has independent audits and a board of independent directors.

The entire asset of the fund is completely transparent to the public, updated daily. If you search for "USDC" online, you can visit BlackRock's official website to see the face value, purchase time, and maturity time of each treasury bond clearly. All treasury bonds have maturities within 90 days, representing extremely liquid and price-stable dollar assets.

Additionally, there are assets existing in the form of "overnight treasury repurchase agreements," guaranteed by the world's largest systemically important banks (G-SIBs), which are essentially equivalent to treasury bond assets.

Thus, every component of this reserve structure is visible and transparent. Anyone familiar with market liquidity and financial assets will tell you: if we need to redeem all assets within 24 hours, it is entirely feasible.

About 10% of the reserves are basically held in cash at several global systemically important banks, commonly referred to as "too big to fail" banks. Currently, there are about 50 such banks globally, including institutions like JPMorgan. We have publicly disclosed some of these partner banks. These banks, due to their large size and solid reputation, effectively enjoy implicit government backing.

Moreover, we have established global infrastructure to support institutional clients in creating and redeeming USDC. We are able to conduct these operations precisely because we are a regulated company. Banks and regulatory agencies around the world are thus willing to allow us to operate in local markets.

We have obtained regulatory licenses in Singapore and Europe and are working with places like Japan to establish compliant distribution channels, meaning that institutions can open accounts in the Singapore banking system, Hong Kong banking system, Brazilian banking system, U.S. banking system, and European banking system to create or redeem USDC.

In other words, as long as you have a bank account in these countries or regions, whether as an individual or an institution, you can create and redeem USDC, with the funds flowing directly into the aforementioned reserve structure.

So, from the operational perspective of local banking systems, you have the liquidity to create and redeem; from the underlying reserve assets, you have the most liquid and robust asset support globally; and there is also a publicly registered, daily disclosed reserve fund structure, combined with the regulatory mechanisms of global regulatory agencies.

Circle's Future Plans

You might remember that before the iPhone appeared, there were about 17 different mobile operating systems on the market: Symbian, Windows Phone, Palm, BlackBerry, and NTT Docomo's systems—various systems, with each company vying to attract developers to their phone systems for distribution.

To be honest, those systems had terrible experiences and were simply inadequate. You would attend the World Mobile Congress and see a bunch of people showcasing their products based on Symbian, only to find a pile of garbage.

So what I want to say is that, to some extent, ensuring reserve safety—while these systems may seem advanced in architecture, the actual user experience was poor.

They were more like a set of operating systems competing for ecosystems, developer resources, and functional friendliness. But I want to be very clear: we have not yet reached the "iPhone moment" for blockchain.

What we truly need is a blockchain network that does not just support financial transactions.

It should also support social interactions, gaming, content, intellectual property, traceability of AI data, trading flows of AI agents, retail-scale applications, and widely used digital tokens, etc.—and none of these can be achieved yet. The throughput is insufficient, the systems cannot hold up, and the infrastructure lacks scalability.

In the long run, we need a network capable of processing millions of transactions per second, which is an achievable goal. At the same time, the development experience for software engineers and user experience aspects are still in their early stages.

Reflecting on my past experiences in platform software, developer tools, and user experience, I feel that we are not fully prepared yet. Of course, I agree on one point—we are very close.

But even if we do have a "click-to-connect" blockchain platform, I believe that new layers will continue to be added on top of it, and more networks will emerge.

You can foresee a period where, for example, you are a large internet company in Asia with 500 million users, and you want to introduce digital tokens, stablecoins, and smart contracts for these users. Once you open it up, all existing infrastructure on the market will collapse under such massive traffic.

But you can imagine that one day, this model will evolve like AWS's "Virtual Private Cloud" (VPC), giving rise to a type of "dedicated blockchain" that forms a network model of interconnected chains to support large-scale expansion. This will essentially bring more "fragmentation," but it also means more infrastructure development.

As Circle, our goal is to ensure that stablecoin network protocols like USDC, EURC, CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol), and gas fee abstraction can be easily invoked in these environments—so that users and developers do not have to worry about the underlying complexities.

So whether the future supports 15 chains or 50 chains, I cannot tell you the exact number, but I can assure you: we will continue to expand, deploy, and release stablecoin infrastructure to support more blockchain networks.

As for when the "iPhone moment" will truly arrive, or when we will enter a phase of diminishing marginal returns, I do not know.

Speaking of currencies, we have currently launched USDC and EURC. I cannot say that we will definitely issue more currencies in the future, but it is certain that globally, whether in emerging markets or developed countries, stablecoin regulatory frameworks are gradually being implemented, and we are seeing more and more high-quality stablecoin projects coming online.

I believe that by 2025, you will see more fiat stablecoins like the Mexican peso, yen, Australian dollar, and British pound emerging. And we at Circle do not need to be the issuers of all these currencies; what is truly needed are compliant, high-quality local teams to issue these stablecoins using the infrastructure we have built, achieving good cross-currency interoperability, allowing applications to easily connect and use different currencies.

The issuance of each currency is complex, involving a lot of legal and regulatory issues, as well as considering the preferences of local central banks and market acceptance.

We will also evaluate market size, such as how large the market for this currency is, which is also a key point we mentioned earlier.

We sincerely believe that in this "era of internet financial systems," the status of the dollar will only become more important, and the dollar stablecoin (USDC) will be at its core. Therefore, our main focus will certainly remain on this.

At the same time, we also want to connect entry and exit points in different global markets and establish interoperability, which we will continue to promote and are very pleased to see the development of other projects.

However, from a business or ecosystem perspective, we do not believe that we must do all these non-dollar currencies ourselves.

From the perspective of monetary theory—whether from the central bank's perspective or the commercial bank's perspective—there is actually a concept called "neutral interest rate." This interest rate is neither accommodative nor restrictive.

We experienced a long "zero lower bound" era after the 2008 financial crisis, during which government debt was also monetized to hedge against the crisis. Later, due to soaring inflation, central banks made strong tightening responses. Interest rate policies essentially follow this cyclical pattern.

But whether it is "nominal interest rates" or "neutral interest rates," they essentially fluctuate around a target range. Some economists now believe that the neutral interest rate may be around 2.75% to 3%—this level neither suppresses the economy nor overly stimulates it.

So, whether you are a central bank or a bank, high interest rates do not necessarily mean "good." Of course, banks or institutions like ours may benefit somewhat from increased interest income on reserve assets, but overall, this environment is restrictive—economic activity decreases, the velocity of money slows, capital investment slows, and risk appetite decreases.

When interest rates fall, indeed, the interest income on our reserve assets will also decline, which is an objective fact. But at the same time, money becomes cheaper, liquidity increases, capital investment rises, and economic activity accelerates—this is good for the venture capital market, the real economy, and entrepreneurial activities. And all of this will, in turn, promote the use and growth of stablecoins.

We have experienced both loose and tight cycles. The next phase may be a more moderate cycle, which we cannot predict yet. But we always believe:

On one hand, there are macroeconomic forces at play that we cannot control, such as the direction of the global economy and central bank decisions;

On the other hand, we have built a platform network with user growth flywheels and developer ecosystem flywheels, and we are creating a highly practical form of digital currency while building a powerful developer platform—this system itself has an inherent growth logic.

Today, the total market size of "legal electronic currency" exceeds $100 trillion. I believe that one subset of this market—the stablecoin market represented by dollar stablecoins and euro stablecoins—will continue to expand, regardless of whether interest rates are high or low.

What we are currently seeing is that the total scale of stablecoins is only about $160 billion (now over $200 billion), accounting for just 0.16%. This is clearly still a very early stage.

If you agree that "internet-level utility" has reshaped media, communication, transportation, and software distribution, then you will also believe that this new form of internet currency may have the same transformative potential in the future.

If all goes well, perhaps in the next 10 to 20 years, we could see 10% of the world's currency transformed into forms like stablecoins. This does not sound exaggerated—because achieving a 10% penetration rate for internet products indeed takes years or even decades, but it will certainly change the world.

We hope Circle can be an important participant in this transformation.