All right, we are continuing here at Canaccord Genuity's sixth annual Digital Ass et Symposium. Up next, we are very, very pleased to have our keynote session of day two, and that keynote is with Jeremy Allaire, who's the Chairman and CEO of Circle. Many of you clearly know who Circle is and know the investment case here. For those very few that may not, Circle is one of the true juggernauts in the broader digital assets ecosystem, and is the leading global issuer of compliant stablecoins. Company's USDC stablecoins are true digital dollars, tokenized and fully reserved, and which can move across blockchains and the internet instantaneously and pretty much frictionlessly. This is a major distinction and upgrade from electronic money, which has been with us for a very long time and hasn't changed much in 40 years. We think of stablecoins as the true programmable money layer for the internet, and the TAM is really honestly a broader M2 money supply over time, which in the U.S. stands at $22 trillion. Against this backdrop, we like Circle's competitive positioning in what might be one of the last major addressable markets that has not been truly disrupted by advancing technology over the past 10-15 years. There are a lot of big companies out there looking at launching stablecoins. Some may come from the e-commerce world, some may come from social media, some may come from TradFi. You know, all of these players have existing businesses, and in contrast, Circle is a pure play in stablecoins, with no ulterior motives other than USDC and the broader stablecoin market. Therefore, we view Circle as the Switzerland of stablecoins, which I think makes them a number one choice when people are contemplating adoption of stablecoins. In contrast, you know, and I'm gonna ask Jeremy this in a little while here, you know, would Amazon really wanna accept a Walmart stablecoin? They may have to if they're compliant, but you know, it doesn't seem like a natural partnership there. I could go on for a while, but with that not so short introduction, welcome and thank you for being with us here today, Jeremy. Thanks, Joe. I'm very, very happy to have the conversation and be with you guys for this event. Great. Maybe we'll just do a two minute quick intro, and then we'll jump into some more, detailed questions. Yes. You do an intro on Circle. Yeah. Sounds good. Yes. I'm Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Circle. Circle got started 13 years ago at really the inception of blockchain technology. We have, you know, we were animated by a vision that over time that the technology of blockchains would allow us to build a protocol for dollars on the internet. That this would ultimately be protocols like we have for the web or for software delivery or for communications on the internet. That would become possible, that we could take dollars, fully reserved dollars, so not fractionally reserved dollars, and allow them to work on the internet in an open, interoperable way. Ultimately drive the cost of storing and moving value down to effectively zero, kinda commoditizing payment utility. We spent a number of years building towards that, working with governments, policymakers, regulators around the world, working with banks, other leading financial institutions to build up that infrastructure. That led to the development of our flagship product, USDC, which launched eight years ago. USDC had its start in the digital asset markets and is now really expanding into a really wide array of use cases, from cross-border settlements for enterprises to infrastructure inside some of the leading payment companies of the world, to being used as collateral in capital markets transactions, in trading markets, in various types of e-commerce transactions. More recently, we're seeing USDC and related infrastructure being used by AI agents, which have started to proliferate, even in the recent quarter. Circle has always been focused on being trusted, transparent, compliant, having good governance. That has set us apart. That has allowed us to work with the world's leading institutions. We're, you know, we've been the first company registered and regulated in many markets around the world. The last thing I'll say with this intro is over the past year and a half, Circle has really been broadening out our platform. Today, Circle really is an internet financial platform company. We're building operating system technology with Arc, which is an operating system layer for the future economic and financial system on the internet. We have a digital asset layer, which includes not just our stablecoin network with USDC, but it also includes EURC, the world's largest euro stablecoin. USYC, which is one of the very largest tokenized treasury and money market products in the world, and other infrastructure. Then up the stack, we're building applications that benefit from all this. Circle Payments Network, which we call CPN, is an application utility that's being used by over 50 financial institutions and growing to create a compliant, easy way to move money globally using the power of stablecoins as a settlement technology. We've really broadened out what we do and that's a little bit about the company. I think it's more than a little bit, Jeremy. It's a great technology platform. You know, most people just see USDC, but you know, the ecosystem, it's big. It's providing a lot of people the ability to build and to, you know, make their own use cases from USDC, and it feels like you're just starting on that journey. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to go back, and I think for the benefit of people, you know. This kind of took like a minute for me to sink in when I was first learning, you know, the Circle story. You know, I have a fintech background. The difference between digital money, programmable money, and what we call electronic money today. You know, my analogy is, you know, if you use your PayPal or something, you know, on a website to do e-commerce, you're still drilling a portal back into old kind of established antiquated payment systems, even though you're on the internet. Yeah. It's really just a kind of virtual representation of old school money. Yeah. It's not really programmable. It was a nice little step forward, but I think that is truly, you know, not what stablecoins are. That's truly a programmable money layer. I'd just love for you to kind of provide- Yeah your own, you know, differences between the two for people. Yeah. I mean, look, I think, you know, most of what we experience as sort of this, you know, electronic money or software-based money today is sort of lipstick on a pig, as we say. It's sort of a user experience, a decorative user experience on top of an existing old plumbing. I think, when we started Circle, we really started, you know, taking first principles. How do we have a dollar, the safest form of dollar that we can come up with, which would be something that's as close as possible to like a government obligation dollar? How do we actually represent that as a digital asset that is a digital bearer instrument like digital cash that can freely circulate on the internet? Really getting to the base layer of money and expression of the base layer of money, where that expression, it has a native internet infrastructure layer behind it. This is similar. When we sort of had, you know, people had, you know. If you remember, you know, satellite radio is digital satellite radio or, you know, your cable video on demand was digital cable, or, you know, there are 500 channels of digital satellite. It was digital, meaning it happened to use binary. When we really think about what digital media was, it was when the actual physical manifestation of a song, of a movie, of a document actually became things, artifacts on the internet that could run over open protocols on the internet, that had the total reach of the internet and ran over open networks. That's what made those different. That's really what we saw when we started Circle. We could get at that base layer, and then from the ground up, build up other aspects of the financial system. That's where the programmability came in. I think the insight that we had 13 years ago, when you know, when we were getting started, there was this idea of programmable money. There was this idea that blockchain networks would become computer networks. They'd become computing platforms. They'd be operating system-like technologies that didn't exist then. The idea of a smart contract was, you know, sketched out on a napkin at that point in time. I had spent my career, working on a lot of different internet technology stacks, including programming languages, virtual machines, application servers, core infrastructure, and I could see clearly the power of a compute engine that, you know, could run on these cryptographic computing systems. What that would allow for over time is a composable, programmable financial system. You'd have a base layer of ultra-safe, you know, digital cash money, and you'd have the ability to write software that could, you know, build higher level abstractions, whether that be a loan, a trade, a bond, you know, all the kind of financial primitives that are there. You know, we've seen versions of that really happen through DeFi. We've seen software machines that create options markets, derivatives markets, that enable people to issue and tokenize credit and other things on these models. I think really, you know, we've reached a point where, you know, this was in many ways like an early adopter technology, experimental, but obviously still sizable. We finally got, you know, I think the kind of legal and regulatory clarity around the world, not just in the U.S., that's now making this a kind of more hardened part of the global financial system. That's great. That's a great overview and explanation. I like the kinda digitization analogies to other assets that have been truly digitized, and I think that programmable ability is something that's exciting, especially as you mentioned, you know, at that intersection of, you know, potentially agentic AI and stablecoins, which we are gonna get to in a minute. But I also wanted to just at a high level to kind of ping you on what you think the TAM is here. I mean, if you think old electronic money is M2, and this is a newer version of M2 'cause it's really programmable and it's just as reserved. I mean, it's. You know, it is money because it's fully reserved. Do you see M2 as the TAM here? Is that the TAM, or is it a piece of M2, or how do you view that? Yeah. You know, there's a few different pieces that we look at. Again, you have to kind of expand across the full suite of what Circle is doing to capture that. The first is, you know, global money supply is, you know, I think around $120 trillion in value. You have M1, you have M2. What's interesting about it is, you know, most of M2 is credit. It's credit money. It's essentially kind of leveraged credit money. I'll come back to that because I view that as part of the TAM. There's a huge portion, and it's estimated around $60 trillion of that money supply is in the form of either physical cash or non-interest bearing demand deposits. Essentially payment money, working capital money in accounts all around the world. Stablecoin money immediately most significantly addresses that $60 trillion, right? Working capital money, payment money that exists in the world, but a far more high utility version of that one runs natively on the internet. When we think about that total TAM, whether it's the $120 trillion or the $60 trillion that's there's sort of the money stock itself, which is one dimension of the TAM. Then there's all of the different utilities that utilize that. Those utilities include all of the, you know, exchanges that we have in the world. They include every payment system that we have, every payment utility and payment application, that includes the card networks or other payment schemes. You know, B2B payment infrastructure products. All the different utilities from capital markets infrastructure all the way down kind of transform, move, and use that money and extract fees. Within the world of the utility that gets wrapped around that money, there's also an enormous TAM. Our view is that more and more of the money stock will become truly digital currency native, and that will just grow over time. More and more of the utilities for how that money is used will become, you know, software native, will become internet native, and will be delivered far more efficiently, globally, et c. It's both of those together that really represents the TAM that not just Circle can fulfill, but the entire ecosystem that works with this technology can fulfill. There are gonna be lots of different players that transform, whether it's the Nasdaq moving to tokenized equities and blockchain-based systems and sort of changing the way in which equity capital markets work to utilize, you know, stablecoin money, tokenized equities, et c. There's gonna be a lot of transitions that happen, just like we've seen in whether it be enterprise software moving to the internet or communication services moving to the internet, these kind of migrations of these established utilities to more internet native delivery. The TAM really encompasses both of those and that. I think that's significant. Then for Circle specifically, we're playing in the application utility space with CPN. We're building a generalized payment network utility that is designed for financial institutions to utilize that. We're building the money layer across a number of different core monetary assets, key reserve currencies, you know, treasury money, kind of T-bill money. We're building operating system technology, and I think this is one of the most exciting areas, which is there is this new paradigm of economic operating systems. These are an evolution of blockchains to provide an environment where economic activity can be expressed, executed, coordinated in a tamper-resistant way. These economic operating systems will have significant fee revenue attached to them and other, you know, monetization opportunities as well. We're going, you know, very aggressively into that space with the development of Arc. We're gonna play at this fundamental infrastructure layer, that's part of our TAM. In the actual digital money layer, which is the money stock of this, and at the application utility layer, which we think can be significant over time as well. That's great. Updates my view on the TAM, so that's great. Thank you, Jeremy. Yeah, we've got this money layer, and you know, we've mentioned Arc and CPN a little bit. You know, stablecoins can move around on other blockchains today. Clearly, you know, Ethereum holds a lot of, you know, the stablecoin volume globally. Arc is an L1 that's being purpose-built, I believe, to drive transaction volume. It is an infrastructure layer of, you know, what could be, you know, a much, you know, larger, you know, base of economic activity. Can you just go into the vision on Arc and, you know, how it potentially evolves over time? Sure. The first thing I'd say, just to connect to one of the things that you were noting, is that. You know, our stablecoin network today operates as of today, I believe, on 32 different blockchain networks. We are the most portable cross-platform stablecoin network in the world. We've prioritized interoperability as a huge thing. That means if there's a new network with new users, with new applications, with new utility, we wanna make sure that our digital dollars and our protocols work there. So we continue to do that, and that's been significant, and we work with all of these different ecosystems. That's one piece. At the same time, you know, as we've engaged with the market over the past number of years, and we've engaged with major institutions, global systemically important banks, clearing houses, global custodians, the largest asset issuers and asset managers in the world, the firms that run payment systems like Visa or Mastercard, as well as governments and government regulators. What we have found is that the kind of early adopter phase of these blockchain networks was not necessarily suited to the needs of the mainstream scaling phase, and that there's a whole set of things that those types of institutions really need if they're gonna migrate their activity entirely onto these networks. We looked at that and we saw that Circle as a kind of market neutral infrastructure company that's learned a lot about the use cases for real world financial activity. We were in a very interesting place to be able to go into this market. Both through organic R&D, multiple acquisitions, we built this up. We launched Arc in test phase in October with over 100 major companies, including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Visa, Mastercard, and so many other incredible companies. We're moving towards what's called mainnet launch, which is the kind of full commercial launch. I think for us, though, the vision is as an economic operating system, these networks are gonna need to support a lot of different activity. What is that? Of course, it needs to support the movement and transactions of things like digital dollars. These also need to be kind of canonical platforms for firms that want to issue digital token-based versions of their own assets. It needs to be a canonical platform for a bank issuing a tokenized deposit, for an asset manager that's issuing tokenized funds, for equity issuers, for credit funds, for so many different forms of assets that exist in the world. We built fundamental infrastructure at the core that is for those types of issuers. It needs to be run as a network that is not a decentralized anonymous system. The way that most of these networks have been run, it actually needs to be a network where the firms that operate the network are known, that they're held to very high standards of information security, compliance, operations, et c. The network is a network where the operators of the infrastructure are known, and those operators are ultimately serious financial institutions, serious financial infrastructure companies. It's a very different model than the kind of decentralized, let's build something that is, you know, away from government. Here, we're working with a global base of firms who can, you know, operate with this and that can uphold the standards that, you know, a major banking regulator would say, "Yes, you can put real money and real transactions on this." We've taken that approach, which is different. You know, the longer term vision here is as more and more forms of assets and financial contracts move onto these systems, this will extend more deeply into corporations themselves. Just like corporations went through the process of being an offline company to being an online company, where they rewired their business processes using software that faced customers on the internet, that was a whole transition that took 10 or 15 years. We're gonna go through the same transformation. Corporations are going to move from being sort of online to being on chain. More and more of the things that are economic in nature, the treasury management of the company, the contracts of the company, the economic contracts of the company, all of the financial activity of the company, the governance and voting that's involved in companies, all of those things are gonna move on chain, and you'll have more digitally native corporations. Increasingly, and this touches on the agentic and AI side of this, increasingly, these corporations that move on chain, the primary units of labor are gonna be AI agents. We expect that the vast majority of work that is executed in the real economy is gonna be work in particular in certain industries, but it'll be work conducted by AI agents. Those AI agents are gonna need economic tools. They're gonna need to have you know, the ability to make and receive payments. You're gonna need to be able to compensate external AI agents that are doing work on your behalf and have contractual arrangements with them. This whole migration to an economic internet is what we're going after with Arc. That's a great explanation, and I learned a lot right there, Jeremy, myself. I think that goes back to your earlier comments that, you know, you're a technology platform. You know, everyone's kind of focused on USDC and what USDC in circulation is right now. You know, that is, you know. You know, I've been looking for, okay, how does TradFi really jump into the world of digital assets? And it's like- Yeah Well, it's like, is it clarity and then they're gonna move in? You know, how much can, you know, the big juggernauts in the sector move the sector forward by themselves? You know, yourselves, other big players like Coinbase doing a great job, but, you know, everybody else is, you know, not there yet in from the TradFi world. It feels like that explanation you just. Or, you know, the illustrations of what Arc could be well beyond just applications related to stablecoin, your stablecoin usage. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Right? To a much broader tokenization effort of a lot of things, right? This is like the first thing I've seen in a while that is, okay, this is a real tip of the spear for a broader, you know, economic migration. That was really great to hear. You know, on that note, I mean, that's an ambitious. I mean, clearly you have the, you know, the blockchain expertise, you've got the regulatory expertise, you've got, you know, the stablecoin expertise to envision and implement something like Arc. Are there other Arcs that people are working on that you're aware of out in the world that are similar in terms of, you know, their breadth and depth of capability to move the world towards more of a tokenized and, you know, agentic world? Yeah It's pretty interesting. Yeah. I mean, look, I think a couple thoughts. I think the first is that, you know, the evolution of blockchain technology in some ways mirrors, you know, the evolution of things like mobile. If we can- ...if I use that as a reference point because we can all remember, for example, the, like, 15 years in the desert where, like, there was a new mobile platform coming out like every year. There was the Palm Pilot, there was the Compaq iPAQ, there was the Windows Phone, there was the Symbian phones, the BlackBerry, the NTT smartphones, like all this stuff. We watched as that evolved, and everyone was always so excited about the promise of mobile. You know, like 100,000 people would get together every year in Barcelona, go to Mobile World Congress, and they'd be all showing off like, "Look, you can do a mobile game," or, "Look, you can use this for your inventory tracking," or whatever it was. The reality was, it was total crap. None of it worked. It was a really bad experience. The tooling, the user experience was poor. These were huge companies, Nokia, Samsung, you know, NTT, Microsoft, pouring billions of dollars into this bet that these platforms were gonna become significant, right? It really took. There were multiple things that happened simultaneously, including iOS, including Android, and really a convergence of technology forces that had to do with the kind of capabilities of hardware, had to do with capabilities of software, how that got put together, and you hit this inflection point. You all of a sudden had kind of an open stack that really enabled a surface area that people could innovate on, and people didn't even know what you were gonna be able to create. That was the amazing thing, is that we went from, like, all these ideas about what mobile could be to, you know, this explosion of millions of apps that were there. Now, I think we're sort of going through a similar transformation right now. To answer your question more directly, of course, there are others that are trying to think about this next generation of economic operating system that takes blockchain technology from an early adopter phenomenon to a mainstream scale phenomenon that penetrates the entire global economic and financial system. The opportunity is enormous. I think, you know, when we think about Arc, we really think about it. In some ways, it's a little bit like our Android, right? We're bringing it into the world. It's an open source technology. We're building the fundamental references, but then we're bringing in a huge ecosystem around it. We're bringing in an ecosystem across all the different categories of firms that would benefit from it, and we ultimately want them to be stakeholders. We want them to participate in governance. We want this to be a real ecosystem play that's open and value-creating for everyone who participates. I haven't seen a project with the same sort of scope, ambition, strategy, approach, but that's not to say there won't be. I think in this area of agentic I think there are a number of people, whether it's Circle, Stripe, you know, Coinbase, Solana, others who have very quickly seen, like, "Oh, this is here. It's happening. It's fast. We've been working on stuff in this space for a while, but now it's kinda caught a groove, as we've entered 2026. That's great. I like that surface area analogy. Arc is that big surface area that was original iOS and Android, and no one knew what we were gonna do with it yet, and it was definitely a lot better than that Palm Pilot module. Yeah for one specific application. Right People just should have been better off using paper. Yeah everyone tried, right? Yeah I do remember those days. Maybe we just kinda drill down a little bit on agentic. We've, you know, mentioned it a couple times, but I think this is a nice area to talk about it 'cause, you know, this Arc surface area is large. I think there's probably been some early days experimentation- with it. It does feel like a lot of the big players in the space see this also as an opportunity, right? To drive things like payment volume, bring costs down, you know, expand distribution. You just kinda, you know Yeah you know, it clearly makes a lot of sense that if you have programmable money going back to stablecoins and USDC. Yeah You have an operating environment where, you know, agentic activity can occur, and then you add programmable money together. It's a really nice combination. Yeah You know, foster a lot of innovation. Yeah. That's exactly right. I think, you know, there are a lot of pieces to understand this. I think the first relates to what you just said, which is, you know, the building blocks. What do these networks and forms of money provide? They provide a globally available, interoperable, open system that software can interact with. They provide a layer that introduces a kind of a proving system. This is really important. We need trust in AI, right? We need to be able to have assurances that the work that's being conducted is valid, that the transactions that are being performed are valid, that the identities that these AIs are representing can be proven. We need these systems of provers, which is what cryptographic networks give us, right? There's like an underlying material there that's really important to AI, which for many people, one of the biggest concerns is sort of, you know, is trust. Now, it's also at a very basic, you know, kind of economic and technological layer, that this is valuable as well. Excuse me. Hopefully, I don't have a cold. Oh. Bless you. Yeah. Thank you. At a technology level, in a world of AI agents, you know, there's one vantage point, which I think is kind of a looking backwards vantage point, and there's another vantage point, which is a looking forward vantage point. The looking backward vantage point is, I'm a person, I shop online, I want an AI to shop for me, and I wanna empower it to go make those transactions on my behalf. That's looking backward, okay? That's useful. That will be something that happens, but that is not the big opportunity here. For what it's worth, I think that, you know, credit cards will be stored and credentialed, and AIs will have permission to use your cards and things like that. I think with the proliferation of stablecoin money and digital wallets that support stablecoin money, that will increasingly be utilized in those transactions over time as well. Again, in my view, that's a looking backward view. The looking forward view, which is the one I'm most excited about, is that AI agents. When you look at the phenomenon that's happening now with AI agents and you look at the work that's happening with Claude Code and Codex and OpenClaw, what's happening is that the units of work, the units of labor in corporations are being broken down into agentic tasks and workflows. The services that one might need to deliver something are being, you know, expressed more and more in AI agents. You might have a legal AI agent. You might have an accounting AI agent. You might have a content creator AI agent. You may have a wide array of specialized tooling that is AI accessible, and that is itself AI based. That whole system is going to involve a value exchange. That whole system is going to require that AI is interacting with other AI and conducting transactions. When you start to get into that world, there is no other infrastructure in the world that can scale from a micro transaction to a macro, you know, billion-dollar transaction, right? There's no system in the world that can do that other than blockchain native stablecoin models. That's very, very powerful. The bet that we're making is that the number of agents that are active economically is gonna grow into the billions, and that the payment volumes that are involved when you have agents conducting very high frequency transactions. Just think about this. If I'm an agent, and I am gonna go to another agent to conduct some work, and that other agent is gonna conduct work, and effectively it's the amount of tokens that that other agent consumes, plus the value-added markup, whatever the margin is on that 'cause of the value-added work that's happening there. That compensation might be, you know, work that costs $0.25. And the frequency of those transactions might be in the hundreds of millions or billions over time. You need an economic medium to do that. We're building that. We're building that at the core. We're building and contributing to the standards that make that work, so it works interoperably across a lot of different systems. You know, I think that's, that is where we're going. I think, you know, people don't typically look at the world through an exponential lens. It's very hard for the human brain to do that. We look at the world through a very linear lens at best. Many people can't even go linear. They just like, "No, the world is what it is, and it's just gonna keep going like what it is." Linear feels like, wow, that's a lot of change. Exponential, we just our brains can't even go there. This is exponential technology right now, and the acceleration that's happening from agentic is exponential. When I think about a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, I imagine huge amounts of software machines, AI agents operating at scale in the real economy, economic operating systems as the backplane for that, stablecoin money as the value storage, value transfer medium that works around the world. When we think about, you know, if you're someone who's covered payments, and people talk about what's your TPV numbers, what's TPV look like, what's your take rate look like, all this sort of stuff, I think a lot of that goes out the window. TPV in this world will, in my view, likely be, you know, many orders of magnitude larger because the cost of transacting is approaching zero. Last week, we announced something called Circle Nano Payments. Circle Nano Payments is in a beta test right now, and it creates a way for agents to be able to store value in a unified balance and to be able to using a protocol called X402, which is a protocol that allows agents to conduct transactions with other services on the internet. It allows that stored value, that USDC stored value, to be spent to any kind of app across about, I think, a dozen different blockchain networks and can be spent in less than a second with transaction costs that can go as low as one-millionth of a penny. If you're talking about micro-transactions with micro-transaction costs that are basically from pools of value that AI agents are utilizing to interact with all these different services, that's the kind of infrastructure that you need. That's an infrastructure that will go live when Arc goes live. It's sort of a core primitive in the Arc infrastructure that we believe will be very helpful to all these agent deployments. That's a lot to unpack, Jeremy. You know, I've been an analyst a long time, and I honestly haven't heard something as potentially compelling as that vision in quite a long time. Super exciting. Yeah. My linear brain is kinda thinking like, okay, this moved forward with some genius, you know, was good, and then clarity's good. My linear, "Oh, yeah, we're gonna grow a little bit here and there because of these things." You know, it never really occurred to me that, you know, it could be, it could just be AI that drive blockchain adoption and tokenization instead of the other way around, you know. Yeah The tail wagging the dog here, you know. Well. Dog maybe AI- Yeah. the tail could be blockchain instead of the other way around, you know. Yeah. We you know, I'm a big believer as a kind of technology futurist and a technologist in general that the most exciting things happen when you have multiple compounding exponentials. Like, that's when it gets really interesting. If you think about the iPhone, there were sort of you know, yes, like, hardware innovation was there, but it was sort of the adoption of cloud infrastructure on the back end, which was sort of the virtualization of what it took to deploy software, and it was the adoption of mobile broadband. The CapEx spend that went into broadband, wireless broadband. You have 4G for the first time. Right to make it work, right? Right. Yeah. When you put together the hardware and the software, if you didn't have the cloud infrastructure that virtualized how fast and easy it was to build the back end of things, and if you didn't have the physical infrastructure at the wireless level, the radio level, if you didn't have all those together, those are like three compounding technologies that created the exponentials and explains also why prior versions of mobile didn't work. The hardware wasn't there. The capacity of the networks on the broadband side wasn't there, and it was hard to build, you know, services on the internet. Cloud hadn't really emerged. Those compounding, you know, kind of exponentials are where you see things, you know, kind of have these different kinda liftoffs. I think AI, crypto networks, you know, and blockchains, you know, regulatory frameworks for how this can be used. These are all kinda connecting all at the same time and are creating, I believe, these kind of compounding exponentials. Right. The setup looks good, I agree. No doubt. You know, there's so much to talk about, but I think maybe we check the AI box a little bit here. Yeah. You know, the vision here is compelling. Arc, you're gonna kinda open it up to big established players, your partners. Does it go to, you know, to fully live, or is it incrementally live? Because, I mean, the vision here is so ambitious. Yeah It feels like it's more than a flip of the switch for the whole thing, right? Because there's a lot going on, right? Yeah. I mean, like, there's a whole sequence of things, right? Testnet, we've got very strong developer traction. We're working with all of the different players in the digital asset ecosystem to make sure that their products and services, whether you're a custodian or an exchange or a wallet or a developer tool company, that your products are compatible with Arc. We're optimistic about having that kinda day one, like, turn it on and everybody can use it kinda thing. The other is, how do we make sure. As an operating system, what you care about are the apps that are there on day one. We wanna make sure that some of the most popular apps that exist on chain today are there on day one. We're working hard to make sure that we have that. There's getting the kinda financial infrastructure partners to stand up and operate this and getting that going through a kind of live testing and operating cycle with those companies operating the infrastructure. And essentially allowing anyone in the world the ability to test out a node to battle test the nodes. And that's an important you know step here as well. I think, you know, additionally, it's getting new things that are starting to come into the market, like these tokenized real-world assets, and use cases, that are, you know, relevant to, you know, larger traditional financial institutions, getting those to be able to be live, you know, when we launch or shortly after when we launch and things like that. That's the body of work that we're doing there, and we're making really good progress. You know, obviously as more and more rolls out, we'll communicate that, you know, out to the public. Very exciting, no doubt. I'm gonna go back to my linear brain and some more simple questions here. Sure Jeremy, in the time that we have left. Kind of in my opening remarks, I kind of talked about, you know, the stablecoin wars, you know. If Amazon doesn't want to accept a Walmart stablecoin, I mean, if they're compliant, I guess you have to. Maybe that analogy is too simple, you know. Then relative to your position as kind of the Switzerland of stablecoins, you know, do you see enterprises TradFi, you know, e-commerce guys succeeding here? You know, does their established kind of big business kind of just create resistance, you know, from their competitive cohorts for broad-based acceptance? Yeah. I think, you know, for us, and this has been something that I think we've sort of been consistent about, which is that, you know, stablecoins are network and platform businesses. They exist as network utilities. Those network utilities have platform characteristics, meaning developers build on the protocols of those networks. When developers build and integrate their applications to those networks, it creates utility for the whole network. It's a classic platform developer flywheel model, and that creates very significant barriers to entry. When we think about those, for Circle, we have a very strong competitive position. We have the competitive position of having done the work of becoming the regulated infrastructure in all of the markets that matter around the world, and that's critical. We've done the work to build the financial infrastructure by working with leading financial firms around the world to plug in liquidity between global markets, regional banking systems, and our network. We've built the flywheels from a developer perspective, and that started eight years ago and has grown, where now, you know, if you're a developer and you're building a product and you wanna support stablecoins, if you don't support USDC, you're at a competitive disadvantage because it's so interoperable. Many products support it. That's what you care about. You want your users to be able to, if they have digital dollars, to be able to transact interoperably with as many people as possible. We've created these very, very powerful network utility flywheels, and those compound for us. The vast majority of implementations of USDC we've never heard of. They've never talked to us. There's no business partnership. It's just they implement it because they need to, because it has such reach. So you have that effect. Additionally, you have what we call liquidity network effects. Liquidity is so fundamental to this. Users need to know that they can create and redeem at scale anywhere in the world, and they can get it in and out of currency systems, financial systems all around the world, and that the actual pipes, if you will, can carry a lot of value. If you don't have all those things, you're not building something useful. The marginal value of something that comes in that doesn't have those things is effectively zero. The final piece is that Circle, as you introduced in the beginning, we're a Switzerland. We're a market neutral company. We're not an e-commerce company. We're not an exchange. We're not a brokerage. We're not a consumer payment application. We're not a payment service provider. We're not a bank. We are a market neutral infrastructure, and all of those types of firms are our customers. They all build upon us and can achieve their own goals by building upon us. As soon as one of those types of companies tries to introduce their own stablecoin, they're immediately in conflict with all of their competitive peers. The incentive to adopt that other product is very low, notwithstanding all the other things that I just talked about in terms of what those barriers look like. It shows up in the numbers. I think this was actually part of what we shared in our Q4 earnings. It shows up in the numbers. Over the last year, there've been many dollar stablecoins that have been introduced, regulated products. When you actually look at the liquidity, when you actually look at the transactions that happen, transaction volumes continue to grow. We, you know, we've seen 250% year-over-year growth. There's some recent data out from third parties in the last week which shows continued growth in transaction volumes. USDC has continued to take market share. We're now the majority of transactions happening on chain, and that's been, you know, very strong growth to get there. When you add together USDC and Tether in terms of actual transactions that are happening with stablecoins on these networks, it's more than 99%. If you'd add together all the other stablecoins that have launched and all of their transaction volume, it rounds to zero. It rounds to zero. The point here is that these network effects are strong. The utility is strong, and we feel very good about our position. I think, you know, for us, there are going to be people that experiment because they think they have a big brand, or they think that this is something closed loop that they can do. At the end of the day, general purpose, market neutral, kind of public internet infrastructure utilities for digital dollars are gonna be a winner take most market structure, and we're well-positioned in that. I feel good about, you know, from an investment perspective, what we're doing with the continued expansion of the liquidity, the availability, the continued types of major institutions that are integrating to our network, the advancements that we're making down the stack with Arc, up the stack with CPN. All of these things continue to contribute to the strength of our position. We pay attention to everything that happens, and obviously, I think when we were going through our IPO, one of the things that we talked about with you and others is in a winner take most market structure, you know, there's typically like three to five players, and we think we'll be one of those. We hope we'll be one of those. There are gonna be players that don't even exist today, right? They're not even in the market today. Three to five years from now, there will be others. You know, we hope to be the most of the most. Yeah, I mean, I remember you saying, you know, the winner take most strategy, that was nine months ago now, and no one else has really popped up yet. Yeah You know, the winner take most analogy is clearly still you know, material. Maybe it's winner take most plus a little bit more, potentially. We're almost out of time. You know, it you know, can the big banks make the pivot on this technology? You know, it's you know, technology's hard. You know, the banking you know, philosophy and mindset is not necessarily incredibly innovative. They usually default in their technology to compliance and things like that. You know, do they cry uncle and just white label or partner, or can they really kind of be part of this winner take a good chunk of the market. Yeah at this early stage, especially when you think of this agentic layer getting added and what that may mean to acceleration and adoption of, you know, potentially more USDC. I mean, my view is across the full spectrum, not just of using stablecoins as a payment system, but across the opportunities to offer financial assets and products on chain, the opportunities for banks are enormous. In fact, today at Circle's global headquarters, we're hosting an event called Circle Current, and we've got roughly 100 top executives from the leading banks of the world and leading asset managers of the world. They're coming to engage with us around you know, all of the different use cases that can be built out. I think whether it's the SEC, the CFTC, the Prudential regulators, every single one of them in the United States is giving green lights. They're giving green lights that banks can go, they can implement this technology. There's more and more guidance coming out. There's a set of guidance from the SEC, which is in draft comment period amongst regulators, which will likely come out. The GENIUS Act's coming online. All of these things are happening. We are seeing banks and capital markets players all gearing up to build on this technology, which is very encouraging. Our message is we can be a great infrastructure platform partner. Our message is we can provide a new payment and settlement layer that enhances the value proposition for your customers. This is important 'cause these institutions maintain relationships with households, and they maintain relationships with corporations, and they need to provide the best service possible to those cust omers. If part of that is adding new capabilities that allow those customers to do new things or to do things more cost effectively, that's a benefit to those customers. The forward-thinking financial institutions are going to embrace the fact that, "Hey, over here we might make less fees, but we're gonna retain our customers." Our core business of issuing credit or selling bonds or providing other forms of working capital or providing other transactional services or providing investment banking or all these things, these remain key. In each of these areas, there's opportunities to enhance those with digital assets. JP Morgan issued a commercial paper digital token bond and sold it. It was entirely on chain. They sold it to in... The purchasers who purchased it with USDC. The proceeds of the USDC went to the issuer in USDC. It was an end-to-end USDC transaction with a digital token bond. It was like $100 million. Now, the point is that all of this, all of the business practices can move to use this technology, and this is not a, you know, this is not, like, an existential thing. This is a, you know, if I was, you know, Fox or Time Warner or AT&T or Verizon or I was, you know, Oracle, and I was facing an, a rearchitecture on the internet, and I'd either move fast or I can move slow, or I can wait, and that will determine your ability to adapt to the new product delivery and unit economics of this, of this new system. Really exciting, Jeremy. We started the discussion, and then we're gonna talk stablecoins. The discussion shifted to, you know, a much bigger and broader set of topics and, you know, really interesting to see this, as you would say, this huge surface area emerging at the intersection of a lot of things, blockchain, agentic AI, tokenization. Really exciting times, and we really, really appreciate you being with us today. It was a great discussion, and I definitely learned a lot, so thank you very muc h. Really my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you.