Whoa. All right, thank you so much for being here today. This is, this is a major milestone in the evolution of the internet. This should work. There we go. It is a major milestone in the evolution of the internet itself. For Circle, it is one of the most important days in our history. You know, more than a decade ago, we set out with a simple but radical idea: that money should work the way the internet works, open, programmable, instant, global, and available to anyone, anywhere in the world. USDC was the fruit of that vision. Over the past decade, we fought for the laws and the trust frameworks to make digital dollars legitimate. We watched stablecoins grow from a curiosity into one of the most important upgrades to the financial system in generations. Today is not just a milestone for Circle.
Think about the moments when computing changed the world. Not when a new product shipped, but when a new platform switched on. The PC mattered because of the Windows and macOS operating systems. The internet mattered because of the web and search. The smartphone mattered because of iOS and Android. All of these computing platforms that turned technology into an economy. Every one of those moments, on day one, it looked like a technology launch. Every one of them turned out to be the founding of a new economic era. I believe today is one of those days. Arc comes alive on the internet, and with it, we are switching on something the world has never had before: an open, neutral, always-on economic operating system for the internet.
A new network platform that is secured and operated by the most important financial institutions on Earth, built for a new economy run by both people and machines. This new economy, intelligent, autonomous, always on, now has its foundational layer. Today we launch it together. We are living through the fastest technology acceleration in human history right now. AI has crossed an irreversible intelligence threshold. It is no longer a tool we operate. It is becoming highly intelligent labor that we delegate and orchestrate. Agents that research, negotiate, write code, and reconcile books. The work of the firm is itself decomposing into tasks, and those tasks are being taken up by machines. This past July, I published a treatise called "The Agentic Economy," and its central claim is one that I want to repeat here, because Arc is its ultimate embodiment.
The agentic economy and the on-chain economy are not two different revolutions. They are the same economy seen from different sides. Seen from two different sides. Over the past 30 years, we built a planetary nervous system for information: the internet. What we never built was its counterpart, a native circulatory system of value. Money and contracts stayed trapped in batch files, banking hours, legacy closed networks, and mountains of offline paper, process, and bureaucracy. Humans have tolerated this world. We waited two days for settlement. We accepted that money sleeps on weekends. We waited on contracts to settle and enforce in weeks or months. Machines will not tolerate this. When intelligence becomes abundant, when billions and then hundreds of billions of AI agents are performing economic work, the velocity of money does not rise incrementally. It rises by multiple orders of magnitude. An agent that completes a task in 400 milliseconds cannot wait two business days to get paid.
An agent coordinating a complex financial contract across borders with another agent can't wait. In global finance, certainty matters just as much as speed. A machine can't call the back office. When an agent transacts, "final" has to mean final. Cryptographically, instantly, unconditionally. The cost of using financial infrastructure should never be the most unpredictable part of the transaction. That is programmable money. Money that is a native object of software. Money that carries logic, identity, and conditions. Money that settles with certainty in under a second, for a fraction of a cent, 24 hours a day, anywhere on Earth. The agentic economy has created a new, massive demand shock for programmable money. Already this year, thousands of paid agent services have come online, the overwhelming majority of agent-to-agent payment volume is flowing over the X402 standard using USDC. The machines have already chosen their money.
What they've been waiting for is their economic operating system. I want to step back for a moment, because a lot of us here have been in this industry for a long time. Let's all just take a moment and think about the era we are leaving behind. For 15 years, crypto fought for attention. It was loud. It was speculative. It was spectacle. The spectacle era of crypto is over. The spectacle era of crypto is over. The most important technologies in history disappear into the background. Nobody thinks about TCP/IP when they search the internet. Nobody thinks about the grid when they flip a switch. That's what's happening right now. Crypto is becoming invisible infrastructure. Increasingly, its heaviest users won't be people at all. There'll be machines talking to machines. Agents paying agents.
Trillions of transactions where no human ever sees a wallet or a hash. That's happening now. This invisible infrastructure is being adopted and encapsulated by two killer apps of crypto: tokenization. All of the world's assets and contracts are moving on-chain. Because a tokenized asset or contract is better. Instant. Global. Programmable. Composable. Always on. Tokenized assets and contracts are growing exponentially and opening up to the world. Stablecoins. Digital dollars that have become the internet's monetary base layer, with the GENIUS Act and regulatory frameworks breaking out all around the world and coming into force, USDC just crossing over $100 trillion in transaction volume this past week. Tokenized dollars, tokenized assets, autonomous intelligence—three exponential curves, all converging at once. Every one of them needs a place to run. A network with the trust of a financial market utility and the openness of the internet.
That place is Arc. Today, we're going to be taking you through everything that is launching with Arc Mainnet. The institutions running the network, the hundreds of partners already integrated, the developer platforms to accelerate building, and new breakthroughs coming to Arc that we've never showcased before. The foundation of Arc are the institutions who stand behind it. Look at our founding validator cohort: BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered, Galaxy, Global Payments, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Sumitomo. These are the institutions that clear the world's securities, run the world's payment networks, and manage the world's assets. They're not just building on this network. The companies that depend on the integrity of this infrastructure are the companies securing and operating it. That has never been true of any blockchain, it has rarely been true of any financial infrastructure in history.
Global companies must be able to trust the network they are running their business on. Arc was designed with the truth that open networks have avoided for too long. An open network does not mean that every transaction must share every detail. Real finance needs room for private information that should not be open to everyone. Payroll, treasury, deal flow—with compliance built in, not bolted on. You will see what that means later this afternoon. Arc is built on a simple premise: the global economic system deserves a blockchain it can trust. Today, that trust is live. One more thing before I hand it over. Every lasting network eventually has to answer a deeper question: how will its participants coordinate? How do the institutions securing the network, the builders creating on the network, and the users depending on the network align around its long-term future?
This week, we took a foundational step towards that answer. Circle completed the genesis mint of Arc, the full initial supply of 10 billion tokens, making Circle the first publicly traded company to mint a network token. Arc token is not available today, and it is planned to become available upon Arc's transition to Proof-of-Stake in 2027, with all network fees remaining payable in USDC. PC operating systems gave us the software industry. The web gave us the information economy. Mobile platforms gave us the app economy. AI foundation models have given us intelligence on demand. Today, the internet gets its economic operating system. Arc is launched, so let us begin the show. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Circle Chief Product and Technology Officer Nikhil Chandhok.
Very happy to be here. I am Nikhil, leader of the nerd squad here at Circle. Here to talk about Arc. We are very excited to be launching it today. Jeremy mentioned an economic OS. There have been many great operating systems in the last 25 years. I have had the fortune of working on a few of them. The best operating systems were the ones that were successful at building an ecosystem, right? They were most successful when they brought others along. They were very successful when they solved problems, and their ability to solve problems came from years of experience of trying to solve that problem. We are building an economic OS, and we are building it like a platform, which means that it is not just launching the Layer 1 blockchain.
It also means that launching all the apps and services that go along with that to make that blockchain successful, which is different from how other blockchains have been launched in the past. I am here to talk about it. We are, I mean, Arc network itself is, we have a, we will talk a little more detail about it in terms of the technical innovation there, but we have a set of global validators who know, who people know who are involved in building financial infrastructure in the world today, and they are moving into this new world along with us to build this new future that we are imagining. Stablecoins and assets, like Circle itself, Jeremy mentioned this, has settled over $100 trillion in USDC volume. We have settled that $100 trillion in USDC volume over public chains, over more than eight years of USDC's existence.
We are bringing all of that expertise, all of that compliance expertise. We are bringing all of that safety expertise. We are bringing the performance expertise, the network expertise. All of that is coming to Arc. We know how to make this successful, and we are going to bring all of that expertise to Arc. Next is our interop stack. Like I said, we have CCTP and gateway. These are existing products. Today, these connect more than 30 network chains. They make it possible for you to spend USDC. You can spend a millionth of a USDC if you wanted to. All of that infrastructure is coming to Arc, and we are making sure that, like, if you have an asset on Arc, you can actually move it anywhere in the world on any chain very, very simply in less than a second. Then we get into the developer experience.
We are innovating there as well. We will talk more about Arc Studio and Arc App Kits, which make it possible for developers to simply ship, simply ship complex financial applications, which was not possible in, like, blockchains in the past. Then we will talk some more about Arc Portal. The main thing is, we want to make sure that as developers, as users, as business owners, as enterprises who come to this platform, they do not view Arc just as an L1 network layer, but view it as this comprehensive set of tooling that makes it possible for them to accomplish their business goals. Okay, so what makes Arc different? We will start from the top. Gas and digital dollars. Gas is a complicated concept. I think most people in the world who are not involved with crypto do not understand gas.
Gas has to be accounted for. You need it in your wallet when you are making a transaction. If you believe there is going to be millions and millions of agents that are going to get instantiated, and they are all going to be economic participants, they are all going to need to be onboarded, not just into stablecoins, but also into gas tokens. Arc takes that away. Arc says, if you have stablecoins, you can pay with, you can pay with, you can pay gas with stablecoins. You can settle transactions very simply with USDC.
The next most important thing is finality. Finality means that the transaction that has just happened is not going to change. It is not going to get reorganized. It is not going to go back. If you have huge dependency trees on transactions by millions of economic actors that are ephemerally created and they disappear, we cannot have rollbacks. We cannot have transactions that are not reliable.
We are able to accomplish that on Arc within less than a second, and for really, really cheap. The third is privacy. We will talk more throughout the day about privacy. By default, all transactions on Arc are public. We work both on the user experience and the compliance necessities of enabling a good privacy primitive on Arc. It is as simple as turning on a toggle and having a private transaction. You can shield not just who you are transacting with, but you can also shield things like smart contracts that you are transacting with behind the privacy token. Assets and interop. All Circle assets are issued on Arc: USDC, USYC, cirBTC. All of them are EURC are issued on Arc. Then we have a whole gamut of partner stablecoins and real-world assets that are coming to Arc as well.
Agent ready. We are treating agents as first-class actors on Arc. They get onboarded into USDC. They can spawn other agents. They can give them USDC. These agents can actually use Circle Agent Stack to do complicated research work. They can make phone calls. There is all kinds of new primitives that are being showcased in the Circle Agent Stack marketplace. All of those agents we imagine to live on Arc, and they will start creating work history on what it is that they are able to do. They are able to convince the other agents that they are good agents because they have all of this amazing work history. Last thing is post-quantum resilience. I mentioned we have done $100 trillion worth of volume on USDC. We care deeply about security. We care deeply about compliance.
We want to make sure that your transactions that you make on Arc are secure forever. Post-quantum security, starting day one, gives us that. Another thing I really believe is that for any new platform to succeed, you need a great developer experience. Developers are the ones who create value on the platform. For Arc, that means, for us, it starts from being fully EVM compatible. What is EVM compatibility? It is making sure that you are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Developers who have been working on Ethereum for close to 10 years can bring all of that experience, all of that tooling, all of those contracts to Arc without having to learn anything new. We believe that is critical to being able to bootstrap this new economic operating system.
Other things that we are doing to improve the developer experience, we have Arc Studio. People may have heard of coding agents. Now, with Arc Studio, with coding agents, you can start deploying smart contracts on Arc. These smart contracts, you do not have to learn Solidity if you do not want to learn Solidity. You can start talking to your agent in English. You can come up with a complex financial application, and from within your agent, you can go deploy it on Arc and start transacting on Arc. That is Arc Studio. App Kit takes something that is very, very typical on blockchains, things like primitives like earn, borrow, swap, and packages that all up, and on-ramping, and packages all of that up into simple SDKs that developers can start using to start bootstrapping their applications on Arc very, very simply. We will keep adding more over here.
The point being, it is not just an L1 blockchain. It is an entire platform. If you are building financial applications today, you should be able to use Arc to solve all manners of problems, not just Layer 1 problems. We have been in testnet for close to a year. We have had 100-plus applications on Arc. They are all launching on Arc today. These Arc applications over the last one year have done over 700 million transactions, and the network is stable. Who are these folks who are launching on Arc today? We have institutions, and we have these institutions bring trust and liquidity. They bring in this is where we believe a lot of the growth is going to come from.
We believe these institutions have been waiting for a platform like Arc to bring their assets onto Arc so that they can interact with the world and with each other in a compliant, secure way. Developers bring innovation. Developers are key to forming the community. We call them architects here at Arc. They are helping us build at global scale right now by bringing not starting with financial applications, but eventually bringing all manners of applications that require some sort of financial instrument to make the application function. Lastly, we have talked about agents. Agents will bring velocity. Agents will bring they will transact autonomously. They will they will build work histories. They will have a way of showing their work. All of this together is going to operate on the same substrate 24/7, 365.
Before I end, I would like to spend a few minutes on the various use cases. This is always the favorite question, being, what is your chain focused on? The way I answer that question is, what is the internet focused on? It is all of it, right? You want to make sure that your internet is able to take your it is take your most important financial transactions. You want to be able to watch videos on the internet. You want to be able to you want to be able to watch memes on internet. You want to do all of it. I do not think Arc is designed as this general-purpose platform, but we and still, we have these use cases that have come forward over the last year of being in testnet. Payments being one.
I think we payments operate 24/7, 365. With all the new partner stablecoins that we are bringing on board, payments will get even more successful on Arc. Trading, I think this is where assets discover their price. People are able to hedge risk. This is one of the first core use cases of blockchains, and it really shines on Arc because of things like sub-second finality and such. Lending markets. If you have an asset, you want to make it productive. We can make we have markets to be able to do that. Crypto assets, real-world assets, all of this all of those assets to being used as collateral so that you can have good liquidity on these lending markets. FX. It is on the back of the partner stablecoins that we have launched and the Circle stablecoins.
These markets, we are hoping to make these markets deep and wide all across the world. Asset issuance. Asset issuance is really important. It is not just important to have the crypto assets on chain, but also to bring in the real-world assets and make sure that they have they have as good an experience as, like, crypto assets have right now. Networks are more than technology. We really need believers to get on Arc. We need people who want to build the future to be part of Arc. That work starts today. I want to welcome everybody to Arc, and I look forward to building with all of you. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Circle Chief Commercial Officer Kash Razzaghi, BlackRock's Global Head of Digital Assets, Robert Mitchnick, Aave Founder and CEO, Stani Kulechov, and DTCC Head of Strategy and Market Solutions, Michael Winnicki.
I think I have got to do it. Let us go. Let us go. Come on. Let us go. Thank you all. What I find remarkable about this stage right now is Robbie's firm manages more money than anyone in the world. Stani's firm has built the world's largest open lending market. Michael's firm manages and clears more securities than anyone in the world. All three of them have been thinking about this future where finance is able to run on internet-native rails for a very, very long time. Today, all three of them are on Arc. Two of them are actually helping operate Arc. It is a real pleasure to be here today to talk to them about the future, what they are excited about, and specifically why they chose Arc as a network to build on. I actually want to start from an infrastructure perspective.
All of you have been thinking about market infrastructure in the form of tokenization and tokenized assets for a very long time. We do not need to argue over how big it can get. It can get very big. It brings in new participants, and it can extend existing use cases. I would love to understand, though, what are you most excited about today that perhaps was not even possible not even a year ago or two years ago? What are you guys focused on, and what are your customers focused on? Why do you start, Robbie?
Sure. First off, congrats to the whole Circle team. I think this is an incredibly exciting day, and we're very happy to be part of it. We've been a close partner of you guys for a long time, and this is, I think, just the latest super-exciting chapter. A big step change, new exciting chapter in what you guys are building. That's amazing. In terms of how it intersects with tokenization, I think it's very substantial. We've leaned in now for a number of years on tokenization. I think that's been well-established. We're looking at this across many different asset classes. Fundamentally, the common thread is it's about access, and it's about utility.
On the first point, how do we take a broader universe of assets and make those available across the world to more and more investors as they build better portfolios and better holistic opportunities to save and invest? Second, is about utility. How does blockchain, how does 24/7 settlement, how does programmability enhance what you can do with an asset by having it in tokenized form? We talked a lot about things like collateral. Interestingly, I think about, with Stani here, what about lending, for example, and the ability to do that in novel ways in addition to the portability, flexibility, and all these advantages that come out? That applies across a lot of different asset classes. We started with money market funds, but it's grown pretty quickly now.
That's awesome. Stani, how about you?
I mean, it's quite exciting time. Big congrats for the Circle team and Jeremy for everything. It's been a big day, and we've been waiting for this moment. I think that's what's exciting about the infrastructure piece is that this is the sort of, like, big moment of actually creating a market structure and infrastructure that really reduces a lot of these sort of, like, friction pieces in finance and improves the cost structure. I think that's open financial systems done in a very, like, compliant and transparent way with privacy is the future. At the same time, I do believe that one of the key advantages for a lot of this infrastructure that we're building is to enhance the cost structure of finance.
I think that from Aave's perspective, we've processed over almost 4 trillion in deposits, 1 trillion in borrowing volume with few hundreds lines of code. Without any sort of a settlement team or, you know, big credit team underwriting this business. I think this proves what you can actually do for the whole finance as assets are coming on chain with tokenization. That cost structure then benefits not just the end users, but all the whole financial system and also brings that access component. I think that's where I'm most excited about. Then also thinking about the future where we're going from here is that how this big theme of automation is going to work. Obviously, automation is about AI, but also on chain.
I think the future financial businesses will run on automation, on chain, which is sort of like the right form factor, and with AI, with agentic AI.
That's incredible. Michael, the DTCC custody is about $114 trillion in assets that could eventually make its way on chain. What are you focused on right now when you think about tokenization as this new infrastructure?
Sure. You know, why tokenization, right? I think both Robbie's already mentioned, right, there's these core capabilities around 24/7 mobility, programmability of assets that can automate capital market workflows, and really importantly, you know, ecosystems, right? How do we bring together not just the DTCC ecosystem, but open that up, right, to the ecosystem for cash management, for collateral management that makes for a more interoperable ecosystem? When we think about these capabilities, it really gives rise ultimately to a world that we envision where capital can move faster, it can be optimized and deployed in a more efficient manner, and we can broaden access to U.S. capital markets. If we can do that through tokenization, we're able to help our clients grow their businesses, also help markets as a whole prosper, right? It's a big ambition.
But what's important isn't just tokenization. It's really the how of tokenization. We're really excited to anchor this service within the heart of existing capital markets infrastructure in the U.S. It's really how we can create interoperability across traditional market infrastructure, tokenize, and create new capabilities while still not giving up the trusted layer, the resilience, the securities and investor protections that exist that investors and regulators have come to expect. If we can combine that trusted infrastructure layer, new capabilities, and unite, you know, traditional and digital ecosystems, we think we have real value that we can help our clients deliver for the markets together.
Speaking of that trusted infrastructure layer, all three of your firms have massive global scale, massive global influence. When you're thinking about the networks that you want to participate in and build on, I'm sure you have every network knocking on your door. How do you think about that decision-making process? What led you to ultimately decide to come help us build Arc? How about Stani Kulechov, you start.
I think it has to do a lot on the form factor. I've been building in the on-chain world for almost a decade and seeing the whole sort of space move forward and seeing, like, the growth of, like, these native crypto assets. I think that we're going towards a world where all of these assets are coming on chain. My sort of a job is to make these assets as productive as possible. I think the way they can get productive is by using as a collateral and being able to unlock liquidity, lending and borrowing, and, you know, creating global credit markets and interest rate markets.
But the right form factor for me is seeing, like, how do we take this technology and implement into the more broader financial world is basically having ability to add privacy, being ability to have a network run by counterparties that and validators that basically you would be a counterparty on an everyday basis, having native stablecoin settlement. That's very important. Then obviously plugging the whole sort of, like, interface on top of that. I believe that that interface today definitely is, you know, broader institutions and, you know, people that are working in finance, but in the future that's going to be a lot, you know, automated and and basically agent-based. I think this is where Circle is putting a lot of energy at the moment.
I think that's where that will be the right approach to take this technology that is technically proven, which is not anymore a technical problem, but more of, like, how do you implement that into the real finance.
Right. Well, I think in terms of DTCC and BlackRock, running a validator and being a validator is a very different kind of commitment than just launching a product on chain. What made you comfortable to feel like right now is the right time to get involved at that level of commitment with Arc? Why don't you start.
Yeah. Well, you're right. We have launched in tokenized form in the past on a number of different blockchains, but this is the first instance where we've actually taken that step to be a validator. I think the rationale for us is the way that Circle has designed this just has, in my view, nailed it from top to bottom in terms of having the exact right future vision around optimizing for stablecoin payments, clearly optimizing for AI agentic use cases, being very quantum forward in the way you're thinking about it. So from a design perspective and the differentiated utility that gets unlocked from really being purpose-built for the massive stablecoin payments use case, we do see differentiation in terms of what Arc is going to be able to do, particularly for the use cases that you're building for.
Michael, how about you? DTCC, comfortable being a validator?
Yeah. We are excited to be a validator. I think there are two answers to the question. One is, our role is operating financial market infrastructure. When we think about what financial market infrastructure looks like in the future, the role of a validator clearly aligns with the types of roles that we want to deliver resiliency and scale to capital markets. There is another element, which is around the connection to our tokenization service. If we are going to deploy assets on a network, it is really critical to us that it is at FMI scale and grade. So when it comes to throughput, security, settlement finality. One of the best ways not just to initially diligence a network, but to have that ongoing diligence and be at the heart of it is by running these validator nodes.
There is certainly an infrastructure component, but there is really an overlap with how do we deliver trust and scale. When we can be at the heart of the networks that we operate on, that really makes a better proposition for our clients.
That is really incredible. What I want to end on is to not forget the symbolism that you are seeing here on the stage today. You have one of the largest and most systemically important companies that has been built on DeFi here with us, with two of the most systemically important financial organizations in the world all participating on chain. One of the things we have been building toward at Circle for the last 10 years is mainstream adoption. What does it mean to be mainstream? All these companies moving on chain. One of the recurring themes is privacy. Institutions are not going to completely move on chain until they have some form of privacy. I am curious, how do you all think of privacy now in a world where you are coming on chain?
What are the things your clients are asking for that you think will be important before more and more activity comes on chain? Anyone can jump in.
Sure. Well, transparency is a nice feature of blockchains, but radical transparency is not a great feature for capital markets. A number of use cases don't really work with perfect transparency in terms of having visibility into who all your counterparties are, what your positions are, where you post collateral, et cetera. This is I think it's important to distinguish. This is not about anonymity, right? That's consistent with the way that you all have designed it to be regulatory forward and compliant in terms of selective visibility. This is about confidentiality where it's applicable. I think it's another really compelling design feature.
That's incredible. Stani, what about you?
Yeah. I think the blockchain world had to start with public transparency in public markets. That's going to be, like, a big part of it in the future. That is how the sort of technology was able to prove itself and connect different use cases. I think that's been a great feature. Privacy is a layer that enables a lot of new use cases. Also, it creates the actual execution environment because I think that markets do benefit from, you know, the transparency aspect. But when it comes to execution balances, for example, or near counterparty transactions, I think that's where the space has been still very nascent. I think Arc has been taking a step further in actually bringing that to as a kind of, like, out-of-the-shelf experience for the network participants.
I think that is going to give a really great advantage, particularly because Arc is built on EVM. So it's EVM compliant, meaning that you can easily tap into an existing developer community that is building a lot of these financial primitives and have access to the privacy layer. So you can produce a lot of interesting use cases and expand the audiences as well.
Michael, anything important in terms of privacy?
Yeah. We're in much of an agreement. You know, traditional capital markets, the lifeblood of it is transparency, but we have rules around trace reporting or one-fund positions that are disclosed that are very carefully calibrated to balance, you know, transparency for markets against information leakage that ultimately harms liquidity. From a DTCC perspective, we're really thinking about this around giving our clients access to the ecosystems and the features, right, that they choose and matter for them for their use cases. There are definitely certain use cases where I think privacy is going to be important in capital markets workflows. We want to give our clients access to the best models that preserve their privacy while still giving us the transparency we need as a good control location for the industry to have the right operator controls as an FMI.
Yeah. Privacy is an ongoing topic that we've been thinking about and working on at Circle for years now. I want to give you a glimpse in terms of the design philosophy for Arc when we think, what does it mean, again, for mainstream adoption for on-chain money movement? There's several aspects that we think are critical. The first is programmable privacy, the ability for an institution to be comfortable with some activity being transparent and publicly available, but other activity perhaps being more private. This includes your transaction details, your balances, your positions, and the different counterparties that might be involved. So that's one important design philosophy. The other is, regardless of whether it's public or private to the world, you need to have authorized visibility. You need to have entities, your counterparties, that always have access to this information.
That needs to be available to you at all times. But the magic in all of this is to have one network that can manage both. So you're not siphoning flow from a public blockchain that's private to that is available and transparent to a private blockchain that might be more protected. Having one network that can handle this and give you that flexibility is really what's important. So I wanted to show you a quick demo of how this would work in Arc today. What you're seeing is a BUIDL contract. What's available to you is you can see all the wallets that hold the BUIDL. You can see the amounts. In some cases, you can actually identify the wallets.
But if you are a user or if you are someone who wants to subscribe to BlackRock's fund, maybe you do not want to have all that information publicly available. So in Arc, by opting into the privacy feature, you are able to subscribe to the fund. Immediately, BUIDL is minted, but it is private BUIDL. It moves into a wallet, and all the transaction details of that wallet are now private and can only be seen by the person themselves and, most importantly, by BlackRock. BlackRock needs to be able to have access to this information. So when they are working with their auditors and compliance team and regulators, they need to know that these assets were handled in a compliant way.
And so the ability to move in and out of privacy and have that ability to have some transactions private where others are public, this is one of the major unlocks that we think are going to be very, very important for mainstream adoption. This is why we are excited about building with you all. This is why we are excited with building with you. Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Circle VP Business Development, Matt Stafford.
Stafford. Good afternoon, everyone. Great to have you here. We have just talked about how some of the world's largest companies are lining up on our network as validators. Let us look at what this actually unlocks, starting with the money movements at global scale. When we talk about money movements across borders, what we are really talking about is one of the oldest frictions in finance, the gap between where value sits today, where value needs to go, and what currency that value needs to land in. This matters even more in regions where people and businesses are moving across currencies every single day but want to store this value in a stable digital dollar asset.
Arc is a great home for this because it combines near-instant settlement finality, low-cost transactions, and the ability to support financial activity across on-chain FX, payments, collateral, and liquidity, all in a single home. To show what this looks like in practice, I would like to welcome to the stage the CEO and co-founder of Ripio, Sebastian.
Thank you, everyone. Ripio's mission is to democratize access to financial services and the digital economy in emerging markets, particularly in Latin America, using blockchain technology. In markets like Argentina or Brazil, two things matter at once. People want to hold value in dollars to protect their savings, but they still need to pay, send, and receive money in local currency. Ripio helps to make that possible in a way that is more intuitive, faster, and cheaper than the incumbent cross-border remittance providers. Let us make that concrete with a simple example. It is not passing. Today, if someone wants to transfer value from Brazil to Argentina, that effect leg is often slow and expensive. First, we are seeing a familiar corridor of TradFi to Arc through a traditional flow. This is a common transfer corridor for individuals and businesses in LATAM today.
Next, we see the on-chain version with wBRL and wARS. These are two Ripio-issued local stablecoins through Uniswap on Arc. What matters is not that just the currency swap happens, but it vastly improves the cross-border payments efficiency and economy. The effect legs now happen on-chain with near-instant settlement instead of being the bottleneck with delayed clearing times at bad rates. In addition to Uniswap that you can use today, this is live right now and you can test it yourself. This FX experience will soon be available for institutions that want to do larger trades on StableFX, which we are really excited about. Thank you.
Now, many users, especially in countries with high inflation and volatile currencies, prefer to hold their savings in USDC, only moving assets into a local currency when they actually need to make a payment. To show this next piece, I would like to welcome to the stage Merlin, co-founder and wizard of Morpho.
Thank you. Hi, everyone. Super pumped to be there. As most of you, I think you know what Morpho we are doing. We are building a credit infrastructure to make the capital more efficient and accessible through the globe. We are super excited to partner with Arc because we think it is, we believe it is uniquely positioned to help us bring trusted credit and earn solutions to a broader set of users, either institutions or retail users across the globe. When we see many people and businesses, especially in emerging markets, see non-USD stable that are becoming increasingly important alongside USDC, and with Morpho, rather than holding USDC, the local currency, you can actually hold USDC, use that as savings accounts, and borrow the local currency so that you can spend at the merchant store or get that into fiat, as you can see on that video.
Morpho offers a very secure way for users to hold those USDC and earn trusted yield in the process. That means that users do not have to choose between holding USDC and holding the local currency. They can actually do both through the Morpho infrastructure. What is more exciting is that Morpho's new fixed-rate market, Midnight, is coming to Arc very, very soon. What that means is that it will make the value proposition even stronger by fixing the rate at which borrowers are going to borrow their local currency, eliminating the uncertainty of borrowing against that collateral. We are super happy already to have an email on Morpho on Arc. Thanks.
Thanks, Merlin. Great to have you.
We have now witnessed how Arc, Ripio, and Morpho are bringing together FX, savings, collateral, and payments into a single connected flow, creating utility for consumers and businesses all across Latin America. That is just one part of the opportunity. Now let us look at the opportunity from a different part of the world where major financial institutions are exploring how on-chain financial infrastructure can support new financial products and global currency flows. For this, please welcome Erika Peterson and Masashi Okuyama, board member of SBI Holdings and CEO of Digital Asset Holdings.
Hi, everyone. SBI is one of Japan's largest financial institutions, and it moved into digital assets earlier and much more deliberately than almost any institution of its size anywhere in the world. What makes that notable is not that they built a crypto business alongside a traditional one. It is that they are bringing the traditional one on-chain for the customers they already serve. They were the first firm in Japan registered to handle USDC. They now issue and are scaling their own yen stablecoin JPYC. They are a founding validator on Arc. Okuyama-san, it is great to have you here.
Thank you for having me.
First question, why does SBI believe that the future of financial services will increasingly be built on-chain?
You know, we do not look at blockchain just as the machine to create new class of asset like crypto asset. I mean, they are significantly important themselves too. As a matter of fact, we run one of the largest VASPs in Japan as well. We see, I think the previous speakers mentioned about it, but the new features that blockchain has, smart contract, programmability, interoperability, and stuff like that, those enable blockchain to do something that was not possible before the blockchain time. That will drastically change the liquidity of asset and money movement. We always talk about this internally too, but money and assets, they are like water or liquid. They will move from one place to the other, and they try to move to places where there is less friction and conflict, right?
I think it's a natural course of thing that all the economy will start to move into on-chain economy.
Where the water runs is a great metaphor. What building blocks do you and SBI see as being needed to make that vision happen?
In my view, I think there are four important factors. One is trusted infrastructure and assets to be traded and methodology to settle the transactions, and then regulatory environment. As previous speakers all mentioned, trusted infrastructure is just essential to this whole thing because why would we put our important money and assets on something that we don't trust? At the same time, trusted infrastructure itself is not just sufficient because we have to have asset or some kind of rights to be traded in that domain. So that's also important. We need a methodology to settle. I think USDC is a good example here. Because just having assets, what do you do with it, right? You can barter them, but I guess crypto exchange has been sort of barter for a while. People were exchanging crypto to different type of cryptos, but that's not really efficient.
The settlement methodology is important. Finally, I think the regulatory environment is very, very important, especially I want to emphasize I believe that most important thing about regulatory environment is the interoperability between the jurisdictions. Because if the transactions stop at the border every time, then we are not really getting the real superpower of the blockchain economy.
OK. You have been steadily building the capabilities to participate in an on-chain financial system. We have talked about these four capabilities. Where do you see Circle and very specifically Arc as fitting?
I think Circle and Arc would play very center role in this whole thing because I just talked about four factors, but Circle has two things, right? USDC, very famous stablecoin, and also the new Arc that we are launching right now. So it will be a very important role that it is going to be playing in our ecosystem as well. At the same time, I hope that SBI will play a very important role in that Arc network and as a founding validator.
OK. Our relationship with SBI, it began with Circle and SBI bringing USDC to Japan. As you mentioned, you are one of our founding validators. How do you think about what we are going to build next together as we look to the future?
Right. Let me talk a little bit about our pre-existing relationship. It started with USDC. I mean, today, the event is not about stablecoins, so I am not going to get into too much detail about the drama. But we did have a very exciting project bringing USDC into Japan. It was very significant for, I think, both SBI and Circle in a way that it was first stablecoin to be introduced in Japan. So SBI got to be the first player to have the license and introduce any kind of stablecoin in Japan. At the same time, I think it is a very important step for Circle too because it was USDC that was what Japan adopted first as a stablecoin. So that was a great project. We have joint venture in Japan together, and we are participating as a founding validator in this Arc network too.
We have a very good, strong partnership. I think what we can do, I can go on the list of it, but the first thing I can think of right now is, as you mentioned earlier, we just have introduced Japanese yen-based stablecoin JPYC. So perhaps we can settle among each other, right? Japanese yen to U.S. dollar, USDC to JPYC, and vice versa. I think it is not just it is not a faster version of what we have, the FX transaction today, but I think it is a whole new different product or service that we can provide.
Hopefully, that all lives on Arc. OK. Last question. We look several years ahead, what do you think success is going to look like for on-chain global finance?
That is pretty clear. I think the success of this on-chain global finance is that we can make a transaction 24/7, 365 days, anytime, anywhere without any friction. That is the goal. I want to use kind of I wouldn't say stupid, but the small example of what I am talking about. I live in Japan, but I still maintain my attorney license in Ohio. I have to renew the registration every once in a while, right? I have to pay for registration fee. In order for me to do that, I work for Japanese company. I earn in Japanese yen. So I go to my Japanese bank account and ask them to convert my yen to dollars. But it is not as simple because they will demand me to open up a U.S. dollar account, which take another several days and extra fees.
Well, it's good that I have it already. If you would do that, then it would take weeks for you to create a dollar account. Then once you have a US dollar, you will transfer the US dollar to your US account. Then you will use your, I don't know, check. Nobody uses checks anymore here, but maybe debit cards or whatever to make the settlement. Or another alternative is, I guess I could use my credit card to pay Supreme Court of Ohio, but the exchange rate is I don't want to make any negative comment of other people's business, but it's a couple JPY on top of it, the current exchange. So that's not really favorable, right? Attorney registration fee is a very small transaction, very small amount of money. But that's exactly my point.
For small transactions, I don't have to go on this financial project to make that transaction happen. In the perfect world, if we are successful doing this, then I can just pay it on the network and then be done with it. So I'm hoping that in several years, SBI's product or asset will be put on Arc network, and people can transact using JPYC, USDC, and stuff like that. At the same time, maybe we can introduce US product onto the network. Our Japanese clients of SBI Group, they can make the transactions on that network that we are.
I love it. Let's make it happen. I love your example of paying for your law license because it's an everyday version of something quite enormous. Well, that's what we're here to build. Masashi Okuyama, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you again for having me.
Please welcome to the stage, Circle VP Business Development, Ben Morris.
Good afternoon. I think anyone who has been in this space can agree that trading has been the subject of massive innovation. Arc builds on this innovation through deterministic finality, stablecoin-denominated gas, and institutional-grade capabilities that will help to usher in this next phase of growth and adoption. To explore these things further, I would like to welcome two guests, Stefano Franz, CTO of Extended, and Daniel Amir, Global Head of Investor Relations for eToro.
Thank you.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Stefano, starting with you, Extended is already an established perpetuals DEX. Why have you decided to fully migrate to Arc?
Extended sees a clear opportunity for us to capture global markets by leveraging the always-on infrastructure that Arc provides along with the deep stablecoin liquidity. The newest topic is these high-quality tokenized assets. Circle is taking a very regulatory-first approach, and that is a very strong fit for the audiences that we are tracking. In that regard, and in that topic of high-quality assets, EURC is a big deal for us. EURC allows us to offer products with a quote currency that our European users understand. They do not have to do complex mental arithmetic to understand the status of their trades. It opens a lot of new avenues for us. Alongside this, Extended currently offers about 40- 50 single-name perpetual markets. These are equities that are not available anywhere else in any even centralized crypto exchanges.
Arc's performance characteristics allows us to expand this to finally hit our goals of hundreds, if not thousands, of these new single-name perpetual markets.
Right. Daniel, eToro has an existing strategic partnership with Extended. How do Arc and Extended create more opportunities for your users?
Yeah. Thank you, Ben. Thank you for having us. First of all, eToro is a platform where you trade, save, spend, and invest. We're a platform that was established in 2007 with the vision that everyone should trade and invest in a simple and transparent way. Today, we are a regulated, NASDAQ-listed platform with millions of users in 75 different countries. Our goal is to provide users with 24/7 access to trading. Arc provides stablecoin liquidity, high-quality collateral, and institutional-grade infrastructure to make that all possible. Arc for Extended really provides the foundation to enable single-name markets on-chain and enables eToro, the venue to bring trade-fied liquidity on-chain. We're starting today with hedging on markets where crypto-native liquidity is deep on Extended platform, allowing support for 24/7 trading access on the eToro app.
Thank you, Daniel. Now I'm going to show a quick demo of us welcoming the Circle family of assets into Extended. Yeah. Let's run it. Go. As I said, EURC is going to be supported natively from day zero. This is a big deal for our European users. They get paid in euros. They don't need to convert it. Here we go. We're going to deposit from euros. Arc is so fast that we have to rebuild our UI. It's crazy. Now that I've got these euros, I'm going to open a position in oil. You can see it's opened successfully. The other asset that we're adding support for on day zero is cirBTC. cirBTC is a very high-quality Bitcoin wrapper, which will allow, again, users to deposit diverse assets for their collateral requirements on Extended.
We look forward to adding more and more support for assets that are being tokenized on Arc. Our goal is to support hundreds of collaterals to allow strategies that we can't even think about. Yeah. Thank you.
Wonderful. Wonderful. Arc is helping financial firms pioneer new trading opportunities for users to take advantage of today's global 24/7 market. Extended and eToro demonstrate this, and they demonstrate that traditional finance and crypto firms alike can take advantage of these opportunities. Daniel, Stefano, thank you so much for joining.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you. Our next partner has pioneered the automated market maker model and remains one of the most trusted names in decentralized finance. I would like to welcome Hayden Adams, founder and CEO of Uniswap, to the stage.
Hayden, Uniswap and USDC actually have some shared history, right? They were both launched in 2008, and USDC was almost there from the very, very start. Arc marks the first time that these two organizations are actually building something together. What does that open up?
Yeah. Before I came out here today, I actually checked the all-time volumes. USDC has traded over or almost $2 trillion on Uniswap over the past nine years. This is just incredible. What I think about when I see that is just the power of decentralized finance and blockchains. Our teams never actually collaborated in a direct product launching type of way before. Despite that, there was $2 trillion of shared activity. That just gets at the power of DeFi and the power of decentralized financial rails. We are really excited to be working with you guys in terms of Arc and building liquidity there and bringing Uniswap v4 there day one.
We've done a lot of work over the past few years to increase the expressiveness and programmability with Uniswap v4, which allows for market structures that are customized to pretty much any asset class. A lot of what Arc is thinking about is how to bring more assets on-chain and new assets on-chain. I think it's a really incredible match there. I think that there's some really interesting things that will unlock in terms of how tokenized stocks trade and how stablecoins trade and how their access around the world.
Yeah. On that point, I guess stablecoins are obviously a core use case for Arc, but we also expect many different types of assets to come on-chain. Uniswap's pools.xyz will be a huge driver of that activity. Can you share a little about what is it and what will deploying on Arc actually enable?
Yeah. I want to talk about pools. I also kind of want to contextualize it more broadly in Uniswap v4 because pools is a liquidity launchpad that we created. It makes it really easy to instantly create a liquidity pool on top of Uniswap for free. We don't add any margin where most launchpads tend to kind of take additional fees on top. What a lot of token launchpads have done has really just made it really easy to create pools on Uniswap. Some of them have done a lot more innovative stuff, but we wanted to kind of raise the bar there. I think that just this process of early price discovery for new assets has been a long-time problem, not just in crypto, but all of society. Automated market making has helped a lot with that.
But the sort of what does it feel like to create a new asset day one? How can you make that early liquidity and early price discovery as efficient as possible, as low cost as possible, as fair as possible? I think is a thing that maybe people don't think about enough is emphasizing a lot of early activity has had issues around what people call sniping or all these different things. With pools, we really tried to kind of invest in thinking about how to create a fairer launch process for new assets and a fairer kind of bootstrapping of liquidity.
One of these assets is Circle's wrapped BTC, cirBTC, which will be available on Arc. What role can Uniswap help in developing that market?
Yeah. I mean, Bitcoin is the first and still largest by far crypto asset. I think that just having there's always been the challenge of having deep liquidity because it doesn't support native smart contracts. I think having Circle Bitcoin on Arc will really allow for the programmability of EVM to benefit. I think that Uniswap, again, with eToro, has just really expressive market structure. What that lets you do is I think that there's just so much untapped value in experimenting with how to better automate market making, better automated liquidity. I think that you really want all of the assets in one place. I think that there's definitely a huge amount of value for I think that Uniswap can basically be the deepest liquidity source for cirBTC.
Yeah. Yeah. As we think about the infrastructure that Uniswap and Arc is enabling, where do you think DeFi will be in 10 years?
Yeah. Sometimes when people ask me this, I'm like, well, I think we'll all have robot arms and stuff. I think that when I think about the future, pretty much all information, almost all information is digitized and put on the internet. I think that the majority of value will be tokenized and put on blockchains. People say, well, why? I think that the answer is the exact same one. Digitizing information and the internet basically just made most information globally available instantly to the entire world. That's part of the story. People talk a lot about the efficiency and the global nature and the 24/7 nature. That was one and that's going to be part of it.
But then there's this other side to the internet that it really changed. It didn't just change what information was available to who and how fast, but it also changed how people interact with information. It is a more expressive programmable medium for interacting with information, which is how we got to all these things like social media. I think that crypto will have that same dichotomy of on the internet, all existing businesses eventually moved their businesses onto the internet, right? Stores, Barnes & Noble becoming Amazon or whatever. Then you had internet-native businesses that were like, what would not be possible without this technology? That's things like things like social media or whatever. When I think about crypto, right, you have projects like Uniswap that are this would not be possible without blockchains.
Then you have things like USDC is basically taking an asset that lives off-chain and bringing it onto blockchain rails, which unlocks what's possible for it. That's kind of so I think there's going to be the world of crypto-native assets, and there's going to be the world of what we're calling real-world assets. That's going to be pretty much all assets that exist. I think that probably the better question is what isn't going to be tokenized. Then the end goal of all of that is basically just making markets cheaper, more global, more expressive, changing the profile. The internet changed who can create content, and we're going to change who can create markets. I think that's really powerful and what I'm really excited about.
Amazing. Hayden, thank you so much for joining.
Thank you.
I think just to end, beyond Uniswap, Extended, and eToro, we have several other partners, including Aerodrome, edgeX, Fomo, Pump.fun, Bancor, and many others that are going to partner with Arc. With partners like these, it is no surprise that Arc is rapidly becoming the home for builders across the entire ecosystem. In addition to popular social trading apps and launchpads, many developers are also building new and innovative trading primitives. What is more, every single major wallet will support Arc out of the gate, bringing in hundreds of millions of users. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage, Circle VP, Engineering and Product Management, Gagan Mac.
Hey, you all. We have had quite a morning. Thank you so much for being with us here. Here is the most exciting thing about today for me. You heard from BlackRock, SBI, DTCC, Uniswap, Morpho, Aave, eToro, Extended. Everyone feels at home, the finest of Wall Street and the coolest of DeFi, all on the same platform, all in the same room. That is Arc. We have about half a million builders and people watching online as well. We would not call it an economic OS for the internet unless we were able to fulfill a variety of use cases and bring a variety of builders on the platform. The financial institutions give the resilience and the stability that is required for a long-lasting platform. The builders feel comfortable innovating on. When you bring these two sides together, then customer journeys become fluid.
There is no fragmentation or stuck liquidity, and financial workflows just work. A payment, when it settles on Arc, on a wallet in Arc, from there, your capital can instantly be moved to earn in various vaults or pools, trade in a variety of ways, pay your vendors, and buy assets that you are interested in or just shop around for memes. It is all fair game. It is all happening in smooth workflows because of 100-plus partner applications that are launching on day one. There is also connectivity to 20-plus networks. Users do not have to keep hopping between wallets and keep orchestrating complex flows just to get more out of their capital. This is all possible because Arc is built as a full-stack platform. You heard from Nikhil and Jeremy today about how we think about it as a full-stack problem to solve.
I will go a little bit deeper into it and show you some of the cool stuff we have been working on. The base layer is a network, of course. Arc is a Layer 1 network with global institutions as validators, which means that for enterprises, the risk trading and the risk profiling becomes much simpler because you always know who the validator cohort is. Stablecoin as gas means you do not have to worry about accounting with volatile native tokens. And sub-second finality means that capital moves with ease. It is never stuck. On top of that, we alluded to stablecoins. Today, Arc launches with USDC, USYC, EURC, and 14 partner stablecoins that cover countries where 1.3 billion people live and govern 45% of global GDP. Today is just day one. We hope to onboard the entire world's currencies on Arc.
Now, these assets on themselves are not locked in on Arc. We have Extended, Circle's Interop Stack, which is a leading Interop Stack on-chain. CCTP is the way how money moves, how data moves with TCP/IP. CCTP moves money. Our goal is to enable every blockchain that has USDC to have one-click, one-second connectivity to the applications. So a wallet on Arc, your USDC when it is held on Arc, or your assets that are held on Arc, they can be deployed on any network within a second with one click under $0.01. That is our goal. We are extending our Interop Stack to all the asset issuers who are issuing assets on Arc as well. We talked about developer experience leading to good user experience. Now, over a period of time, as there have been numerous networks, developers have had to re-architect flows over and over again.
For instance, bridging, sending and receiving across networks, on-ramping and off-ramping, creating a unified balance. All of this stuff is abstracted into Arc App Kits. What used to be hundreds of lines of code is now maybe tens. Arc Studio is our coding agent. From Arc Studio, you can go from an idea to smart contracts deployed on Arc within minutes. There is security scanning baked in, so common vulnerabilities in contracts can be avoided. This is just out of the box. Building is only the beginning. Builders also need discoverability. Arc Portal launches for users to discover the best of Arc. Over here, we will feature hundreds of applications that are going live. There will be novel experiences and novel ways to experience finance for users through agents.
You will be able to construct agent wallets, create flows, chat in natural language with your money, reason and transact in the same place. When you package all of this together, that is when it feels like an operating system. The right levels of abstraction exist for builders, whether they are protocol developers or app builders. They should be able to pick the right primitives. That is what we are constructing for. Let me show you how developers will experience Arc Studio. This is Arc Studio. Here, you are building an allowlisted tokenized share class for a robotics company. In Studio, you can just specify your intent in natural language. This is, of course, a technical example. The contract gets created. There is a problem here that the transfer from function skipped the allowlist check.
The agent corrects itself, introduces that check, runs the contract tests, ensures that the tests pass, and deploys the contract on Arc. Northwind Robotics is live on Arc, constructs the front end for you to click mint. You will see that soon. Once you mint shares, whatever you specified as allocation gets allocated to the wallet addresses. You can check the block explorer, and the transaction is settled there and still linked in. This builder journey is only the beginning. We understand that builders face a lot more than white coding an application. Along with Studio and Arc App Kits, discoverability with Portal will continue to help builders get distribution and get surface with users. We are creating an Arc builder fund to support you through your journey as you try to find product market fit for novel ideas.
An Arc security service is going to ensure that you are able to get support as you scale for any security-related issues. We are here to support the journey of builders through and through. There is something else I am really excited to show you. That is our Portal. There is something that we have been thinking about for a while that when you get on-chain and you try to use different applications, you do not know which application you should not need to know which application is on which chain. Polymarket runs really well on Polygon. You should be able to use it. If you have USDC, you should be able to use it without having to manually bridge. Here in our Portal, once you have your USDC in an Arc wallet, let us say you want to bet that Chelsea is going to win over the weekend.
We are big Chelsea fans here. Chelsea is going to beat Brentford. You can ask a couple of questions, figure out what you want to place a bet on. In natural language, you can authorize a transaction. All the complexity of finding gas tokens, bridging, forwarding, relaying, all of that gets abstracted away. From speaking in natural language to deploying your liquidity into an application is a single step. This is what we mean by Arc wallets serving as liquidity hub for your DEX. This stuff is live today, but there is a long road ahead. We are at the beginning of a multi-year journey. Resilience, scalability, and privacy are paramount when finances are concerned. To talk more about what is ahead, I want to invite my colleague, Sanket Jain. Come on up.
Thank you. Thank you, Gagan Mac. Hi, everyone. We built Arc on the principle that an economic operating system for the world only works when the world runs it. When institutions running a network span every major market, the applications building on it can serve every major market as well. Global infrastructure is what lets global applications emerge at all. We believe a network is as only as resilient as the institutions behind it, and we are building more of that resilience directly into the network. As you may have heard, Mainnet is live today. We have over 100 apps live, but we have also minted 10 billion ARC token, the entire initial supply, making Circle the first publicly traded company to mint a network token. The mint moves us towards our next milestone. In 2027, we plan to transition to the network to Proof-of-Stake.
This milestone will serve for four main reasons: security, validators securing the network will earn rewards; economic alignment, network fees convert to Arc and flow back to people staking it; utility, the deeper you build on Arc, the more useful it becomes; and governance, the people using the network should be the ones governing it. I mentioned before that global infrastructure is what lets global applications emerge, which raised the question we kept coming back to. What does an application actually need from the network powering it? We realized that the answer depends entirely on the application. A block trade, a payment stream, an AI agent all have very, very different needs. Historically, that meant standing up an entirely new network or moving your flows off-chain. We wanted one network that could serve every developer for what they needed.
Today, we're introducing Arc Sectors, a purpose-built lane for each class of financial activity all on one network. The three we're most excited about are privacy, which you've heard about today, which allows you to encrypt balances and transaction details with scope disclosure for auditors and regulators; payments, designed for hundreds and thousands of transactions per second for agentic and institutional payment volume; and agents, verifiable identity and provable execution for software that transacts on your behalf. We expect many more sectors to emerge as the activity on the network goes to dictate it. Let me walk you through the privacy sector. On a public chain today, your balance and every transaction you make are visible to everyone. No treasurer runs payroll that way. No desk shows its position that way. Privacy on-chain has always cost you something.
Either you have to learn a new language or a new toolkit, you wait on proofs and give up speed, or you give up the properties that made blockchains interesting in the first place. The privacy sector encrypts balances and transaction details with post-quantum security end-to-end while staying auditable through contract and wallet owners granting scoped access. It costs nothing to adopt. Same block as public transactions, same EVM code, same tools. Let me walk you through an example of a private payment on Arc Portal. When I go to Arc Portal, you'll see my unified balance of public and private. I'll be able to select $50 and click a toggle for private send. After I continue and select my friend Brad for the payment, you'll notice that before I finish the sentence, the transaction will have settled with the same block, same finality as everything else on Arc.
Sanket, what about the block explorer? Let's go check it out. On the block explorer, you'll notice that all the transactions are private. Only after logging in with a similar experience of connecting your wallet will I be able to see my private transactions that are scoped specifically to me. No one on this network can unilaterally decrypt it. Encrypted on-chain, settled in the same block, and I get to see who controls it. I think that's pretty cool. The internet has only ever known one kind of economic actor: people. Agents are the second, and there will be far more of them. They will need to hold value, move it, and be trusted to do so. No economic infrastructure has ever been built for a user like that. I want to give it back to Gagan to show you what it takes. Thank you.
Thanks. Let's talk about agents. Who here has used agents? Almost everyone. Who here has given their bank account information or Social Security or something which makes you uncomfortable to an agent? Early adopters. Early adopter in chief. But most people are not raising their hands. Every agent wants to be useful to you. They want your personal information. I was trying an agent that is going viral. I asked it, what can you do for me? It said, the fastest way for me to be useful to you is give me your Gmail. I have 20 years of my private history and life in Gmail, family-related stuff, spouse-related stuff. I am not going to give access to all of that. So I asked it, how can I trust you with my email? It said, fair question. But an honest answer is better than a reassuring one.
But that does not inspire a lot of confidence. So I went a step further, very specifically. Hey, how do you protect my data at inference time? At inference time, your content is plain text to me. So where is it getting indexed? Where is it getting used? Where else will it come up? I have no idea. Every day, I come across these headlines. Everything that is hackable will get hacked because software is getting generated at runtime to solve a problem for you. It is beating the static software that has been written over 40 years. We continue to spend a lot of money. We are investing trillions in infra and hundreds of billions, and we are hoping for business returns. But money spent is only input. Token use is accelerating. So how will we get our returns on all this investment?
Agents want to help you, but they are limited by access to your data. As an enterprise, are you willing to give agents access to employee records, health information, money, customer information, credentials? All of this stuff is a big question for enterprises today because intelligence is abundant. Token prices are plummeting. When intelligence is abundant, trust is the bottleneck. But we have solved this problem once before. We learned to trust strangers on the internet. You get into a stranger's car. You spend your vacation in a stranger's home. You invite strangers home to help you with some complex tasks. We learned to follow a very simple rubric. Trust is a function of the number of jobs someone has done, the quality of the jobs, and some trust arbiter in between, dispute arbiter in between. So here, Vitali has 781 overall jobs and five-star ratings.
Seems quite reliable. So I brought him into Assemble, IT for Data and Media a phenomenal job. If he would have messed up, then TaskRabbit, Fiverr, or any of these guys would have made me whole. That is how we learned to trust strangers on the internet and made our lives so much easier. We believe that in the future, you will trust agents similarly. There will be a way for you to trust agents and hire them to help you manage your health, help you manage your finances, reduce your taxes, and so much more. At Circle, we have been really good with instilling trust through open protocols and open software. Earlier, you heard USDC passed $100 trillion in transaction volume. USDC is an open contract, and it works on 30-plus networks. It works in the open. It is an open dollar protocol.
We have been working on figuring out how we can extend trust to agents as well. We are working with our platform to create a chain of trust for agents. It starts with your wallet on Arc. Your private key is the one that controls everything, whether you're a developer or a user. You are building as a developer agents in Codex, Claude, Cursor. You can continue to build your agents anywhere. You can create an agent account on Arc. You can rent your repo and create an account on Arc. In Arc Studio, again, with natural language, you will be able to configure your agent, give it an identity, give it your developer profile. That will create an agent as a worker. This worker also needs a runtime.
We are working on AgentVM, which is Agent Virtual Machine, a secure environment so that agents can run their inference in private and protect your data. In this environment, the I/O of the hash of the input output plus the code that ran, the hash of the code, and the fingerprint of the TE, all of that gets packaged as a log. That log builds evidence of work. Remember, Vitali has 700 jobs. Imagine an agent who continues to produce this evidence over and over and over again. That evidence is independently audited. The details of the work are only private to you. That is when you can start trusting the agent as a worker. With some more qualitative feedback, we can construct that same rubric of trust for agents, and they can be hired on the public internet.
How this will all work, I want to invite our head of agent engineering, Hao, to show you. Hao, come on up.
All right. Thank you, Gagan, and hello, everyone. Gagan just talked about the chain of trust and why it matters. I am going to show you how it looks like to use it. Basically, every enterprise we talk to are telling the same thing. I am ready to hire agents, but I am not ready to hand a stranger my credential, my data, and my money. Let's close the gap from both sides. First, the builder. Next, I am going to show you how easy it is to set up trust agents within Arc Studio. When you open Arc Studio, you will see an option to register my agent. You can register an agent by connecting your GitHub repo or upload a zip file.
Once connected, Studio will read the code, discover the capabilities, and set up the agent profile for you. Next, pick your runtime. We have a private runtime called AgentVM, out-of-the-box for you to use, or you can go with your own cloud provider. With one more tap, Studio is going to publish your agent on Arc, an Arc identity, a fingerprint of the code, and a link of the agent that is ready to share in any of your favorite AI interface are now created for you. Let's flip to the user side. As a user, I want to be able to hire, discover, and hire this agent from any AI interface I want. We are going to show you how it is going to look like within our portal. When you open Arc Portal, you can see a list of agents with their ratings and job history.
After the agent is being hired, we will scan the agent's on-chain identity, their runtime attestation, and then open up a private environment for the entire conversation. From now on, whatever you send, you upload, stays within that private environment. No one else has access to it, including Circle. Once the job is being once the plane is being accepted, the agent is going to execute and complete the job. From this point, everything will be settled on Arc, including your job history, the runtime attestation. This shows you how to hire a contractor on a public internet, a clear scope of the work, a budget, a record of the work, and everything stays in a dedicated private runtime environment and never leaves it. Where does this go?
Looking forward to 2027, as Sanket mentioned earlier, we're exploring a dedicated agent sector on Arc, built for agents operating in real financial markets with four properties: a verifiable identity, so every agent carries a registered identity on Arc, with a provable credential and a reputation attached; a greater mandate. This is the one I care about most. Before any work starts, both sides need to agree on a deal. A deal specifies the scope, the price, the deliverable, and how the work gets accepted. The mandate agents rise under is the deal itself. Policy enforcement, policies like spending limits, counterparty rules, are all checked and enforced before every single transaction. Last but not least, auditable records. Every agent action is logged on-chain so the evidences can be verified against what was agreed earlier. An evidence without agreement proves the agent did something.
An evidence with agreement proves the agent did exactly what it was hired to do. At Circle, we firmly believe that trusted agents on the open internet can help you scale enterprise to work with no ceiling. With that, Gagan, back to you. Thank you.
Thanks. Imagine infinitely scalable enterprises. You can hire the most expert workers that onboard instantly on demand and then release them when the work is done. That's super cool. We talked about a lot of things today. I want to describe what is live today. Our public mainnet, of course, secured by global institutions, 100-plus applications. You can pay, trade, borrow, lend, earn, get your assets on Arc. Agent stack is live. You can use it today. Now, there's stuff that you saw that is a sneak peek. You're not going to see the AgentVM on our portal just yet. We are developing it. If you liked what you saw, this is the QR code. Sign up for early access. We would love to partner with you. There's a lot of cool stuff to build together. Today is just the start of a journey.
We are so grateful for you to be here. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Circle co-founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman, Jeremy Allaire, and a16z Crypto founder and Managing Partner, Chris Dixon.
Hello?
All right. How are you doing?
I'm good. How are you?
I am good.
Thanks for having me. It is an exciting day.
It is. It is. It has been awesome to work with you during this journey.
Yeah. Well, thank you.
In Arc and everything else. For the last decade or two or whatever, we met decades ago or a long time ago. I thought we'd just start this conversation a little bit just sort of talking about this moment.
Yeah.
You're hearing these themes here today, AI agents, just like technology as a whole in this period of hyper-acceleration of software. Software eats the world is even bigger. Crypto.
Yeah.
Both your firm and you specifically are, I think, very steeped in all of that. Just talk to me about how you see this moment we're in.
Yeah. I mean, it feels like we're in the most accelerationist moment in my career. That includes, obviously, stuff happening in crypto, but also AI. Areas I don't really know as well, like bio, from what I hear, like energy and robotics. That's not something I do, but it seems pretty incredible. In crypto, it's kind of a weird time because, on the one hand, some sentiment in some quarters is down, some prices or token prices are down and so forth. On the other hand, we have more institutions entering than ever, more legitimate actors, more growth. I think the growth of stablecoins is an example, which obviously you are the pioneer or one of the main pioneers of and in the center of. I think it's very important that it's growing in a way that's uncorrelated to trading.
Yeah.
Right? It is one of the first real use cases. It is not about trading and things like that. I think in crypto, it is this weird kind of tale of two cities where I think we are moving from an ideological early phase into a pragmatic kind of real application phase, which is a healthy thing, right? Obviously, what you are doing here and all the key partners you announced, I think, show that, right? Just your posture in terms of building serious tech and taking compliance seriously and all of that. The AI world, everyone follows that. I mean, it is just incredible, both the development, the amount of investing going on, the rate of change. Our firm is very involved in this stuff.
I think a lot of this stuff, I am sure a lot of people here have used vibe coding and stuff. It is truly incredible what is going on. It seems like it is going to continue at this pace. As you are talking about today with the agents, right, we are only seeing the beginnings of it. Most of us only experience agents mostly as for vibe coding and things like that. I think it is very plausible that over the next decade, we will have essentially an internet of agents, right? We will have at least an agent per person, maybe many per person. The internet was really the internet we live with today was designed for an internet of humans. Specifically, I kind of look at the world through the lens of networks.
What I mean by networks is the internet is a network, but then on top of the internet, we build other networks. Originally, there was the web, which you were a pioneer of, and email and open protocol networks. Then we had an era where we had kind of these company-backed networks like Facebook, Instagram, Uber, you name it. These are systems where you bring various parties together. It is really one of the magical things about the internet. Another way to say it is, instead of just single player, it is multiplayer, right?
Yeah.
You think about AI today, it is mostly single player. It is mostly you are sitting in front of a thing, you are vibe coding something, and you are using it. It is like a kind of like a really, really advanced old-style computer. It seems inevitable that will become multiplayer and that the same thing that happened with the internet moving from PCs to this networked world will happen with AI. In that so what I think about is, in that world, what will those networks be, right? A very obvious one, which you are all here today, will be a financial network, right? A financial network will require a way to have programmable money and to move it around. The ideal form of money is probably a stable kind of money like the dollar.
Ideally, that system is global, inexpensive, fast, and all of those things and allows you to do things you could have done before, like send money abroad, but do it much more cheaply and fast. I know, obviously, the pioneer of this here, I am explaining to Jeremy Allaire what he built. I am getting something maybe a little different, which is at some and then, as you have always described, that you then have a programmable layer on top, and you will build trading and so forth. Then at some point, I think the big vision 10 years from now is you move beyond just replicating the existing financial world into really building a machine-age economy, right?
Yes.
I got a lot of this from Jeremy Allaire, just to be clear. I am repeating back what I learned from him. I am not taking credit for these ideas.
Repeating it.
It is one reason we get along is we like the same things. At some point, right, you can imagine a world where agents are spinning up something like a DAO, like an ephemeral organization, and performing tasks and sharing resources and spending money and all these other kinds of cool things. Yeah, I think it is probably the most exciting time. It feels like all these things come together. They are accelerating. I do not know. It is kind of a magical time, in my view.
Totally. It is totally magical. We are making magic here. It is. I think it was actually just this conversation just coming off of some of the stuff we were just showing, which is, how do you trust the work an agent does? How do you verify its identity? How does that work on open networks? How do we replicate some of the things that the internet did really well with how do you trust people you do not know or get in a stranger's car? All these sort of trust, reputation, verifiability, etc. It turns out that blockchains are actually really good at that. When you are dealing with complex things, deterministic things like code and data execution paths, things like that, it is actually really good for that.
It does feel like the material is sort of all coming together, what is happening in the inference economy intersecting with what is happening in these economic infrastructures. They kind of need each other. Although it is not totally apparent. People using Instinct or Muse think like, "Oh, that is an agent because it is doing these things." But multiplayer is the key. I want to be able to have these things communicating with each other and not just me as a user, but, as you said, an agentic corporation that exists on-chain. These sort of being two sides of the same coin, that feels like more of what could happen. Let us pull that thread, though, a little bit. You were, I think, you have been a huge proponent of on-chain organizations, on-chain corporations, different structures for that in the U.S., in the legal system.
This sort of intersection of kind of agents, the on-chain system, and ways to kind of create organizations that could kind of be this fusion of AI and humans. I know you have made some investments in that space, some interesting startups and companies that are very focused on it, including Sean, who is here, and Circle co-founder. Talk to me a little bit about go five years out. What is that? What are these agentic corporations doing?
I mean, it could be I think it could be I mean, this is highly speculative. For example, you want to perform some kind of task. You want to create some piece of content. You want to solve a problem. You want to write some software. You have already seen that agents work. I mean, I think anyone who vibe codes, you know that agents working together will do a better job. In fact, a lot of these things will spawn sub-agents and things. The thought being just, what if you could, in the same way that you do in the economy, sort of bring various people from different areas with different knowledge sets, with different skills, and get them to work together? We are already seeing early signs of it. I would argue like Uniswap, Hayden, which is up here, in a way.
I mean, it's one of the earliest decentralized. It's really a DAO. Instead of having New York Stock Exchange, you have just a piece of immutable code. It has a business model. It's a whole kind of thing where it's and a governance system. We've seen early signs of it in DeFi. I think, to me, the big question, like a lot of the stuff you described, like trust, reputation, this will happen. I think there's a fork in the road. One of the reasons I think I'm involved in this space and you are is it could happen with Facebook controlling all of it or some big centralized financial institution controlling all of it and charging high fees and extracting from it. It can, I mean, so one way or another, this will happen, right?
There will be an internet of agents. They will interact with each other. There'll be an economic system. There'll be trust systems. There'll be reputation systems. Everything you built here will exist in some form or another. The real question and the reason that we I personally care about this. I think you do too. Also, we've been involved in policy and other things because we think it's important that there's at least people have the choice to do all this stuff in an open system that promises low fees, developer trust. They can build on top of it, composability.
The users can participate.
Yeah. Well, and what we saw with the internet. This is why the internet was so exciting, right? I mean, there was a real fork in the road. People who aren't old enough don't remember. There was AOL and these centralized services. Then there was this alternative, which was this open system. It led to this massive wave of innovation. I think, likewise, having these systems like you're building be open are very important for incentivizing innovation, for having the benefits flow to consumers and developers, right?
Totally.
So.
I mean, this actually, it kind of gets to the heart of matter. One of the reasons you are here is that you are a participant and stakeholder on the Arc network. You actually led the presale of the ARC token, the largest participant. You guys, as a firm, are active in these crypto networks. You think about them as governed networks with broad open participation. You have talked a little bit about the sort of why the technology we are building is great and it meets the need, meets the moment, the sort of emergent and mainstream moment that we do not need to you can sing the phrases. That is great.
But more importantly, when you think about this as a stakeholder, as someone that wants to see distributed governance and see these become this network, Arc, become a widely distributed, widely used and governed network, what do you see that looking like? Obviously, you are very close to what we are doing. I think that is probably helpful for people here. Everyone in this room is either already or has the potential to be a stakeholder on this network to participate in its growth and evolution. This is not just a Circle thing. We are building something for the world that truly is open and can be everyone can participate.
I think, I mean, I think there is sort of table stakes for a system like this, which is you need to have security and performance and all the other kinds of things like that. A healthy governance system will help with that. I also think a very important thing is sort of credible neutrality. That if I am a bank or I am a developer or some other organization and I am thinking about committing to this network, that I feel like the network is a neutral network and it is not going to change the rules on me or bias things towards one of my competitors. I think one of the things that impressed me when I spoke to you about this project early on was the way you thought about international, right? To not have it be seen as a U.S. network.
I think ideally, the winning ultimate kind of global substrate, programmable layer of money will be something that is used globally.
Right. So you are economically, geopolitically neutral.
Yeah. Exactly. It has to be trusted everywhere. ETH it is seen as sort of the U.S. chain, that will limit its potential. It will limit the potential for the users and the developers as well, right? So having something that truly feels like there is a broad enough set of stakeholders that somebody can come on. Even though I do not the whole kind of point of a blockchain, in a way, is you are not supposed to have to trust the other participants. You need it to be designed in such a way and sort of these game theoretic incentives and a broad enough governance, right, that you do not have to trust it. You just have to trust the code. That is how you really get, I think, an inclusive, broad user base, developer base.
Yeah. There is a lot. Obviously, we can learn from the way the internet itself was constructed with the way that certificates and security and the domain name system and other things have worked. We kind of have this open network, but we have some governance.
The world is better for it. Imagine if we had an internet for seven internets or whatever by geopolitical region or something. It would not. Everyone would have been worse off.
Yeah. No, totally. Maybe because you are an investor and there are a lot of entrepreneurs in the room. There are a lot of people building things. There are a lot of startups that are launching day one here. We have half a million people tuned in, a lot of people listening to you. What do you want to see built? That is not a promise to invest, obviously. But what do you want to see built on Arc? What are you dreaming about right now in this space?
I find it useful to divide every new big technology in between what I would call sort of I call it skeuomorphic and native, but it basically means doing things you could already do in the past, but doing them better. Sending money across, right? You can already do that today, but now you can do it cheaper, faster, globally, and so forth. Trading, lending, FX, these are all very cool. I am not saying that I am not trying to diminish them in any way. But these are things you can already do, and now you can do them better on the platforms.
Internet scale stuff, yeah.
But for me personally, I get really excited by kind of the native use cases. So the things that surprise you. So it is like something I assume that will be something to do with the intersection of blockchains and AI and agents and so forth. But you think about Twitch, just to give you an example. Twitch is not something I think anybody prior to 2005 predicted the behavior that people would watch who play video games as an example. That would be a very internet-native thing that kind of emerged through the intersection of a new generation growing up with the internet and culture and new tools and new technologies. I am guessing the same thing is going to happen. We may be in the skeuomorphic phase right now. Maybe the next five years are just about and that is maybe good enough because the benefits are really large.
ETH, anyone can send money for free around the world, that is a huge benefit to a lot of people as an example. But to me, the thing that gets really exciting is and that is where the entrepreneurs come in. What I have learned maybe the hard way is that investors should not even I can speculate and this and that. But the entrepreneurs always do a better job doing that.
They do.
Yeah. What you have to do as an investor is just kind of keep an open mind.
We are thinking about that with Arc. It is a platform for people to build on. When iOS or Android or other things came out, right, yeah, we can do stuff. We issue assets on it. We have some protocols on it. But it is going to be so much of this is going to be what people create. I have this instinct right now that the looking backward view is people with wallets touching user interfaces. The looking forward is this agentic world. It really feels like the opportunity set is to create completely different types of user experiences where that is the primary user experience. You are using the determinism of this kind of public compute infrastructure of something like Arc to enable these to do way more things, way more safely. The UX paradigm of the future is not going to be a wallet.
I think the UX paradigm is going to be something else. It hasn't yet been created. We're seeing examples of these things emerging. I think actually a16z has talked about this. I think it was a recent essay. I don't know who wrote it. It was about generative UX and more of the UX just emergent out of interactions. We see that too. My own view is just like people invented WhatsApp or Instagram or Uber or all these other apps that came after the app stores and after you had these platforms. There's going to be enormously successful and interesting apps. I hope that they're built on Arc. We're going to try and make that happen. Hopefully, we can all grow this together.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Great conversation.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thanks, Chris.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage, Circle President, Heath Tarbert.
You are with us on a critically important day for Circle, the highly anticipated launch of Arc Mainnet. This is bigger than just Circle. We believe Arc can change the future of finance. That future starts here. Today opened with a film of Ifs, the car, the desktop, the ATM. Each one once impossible, each one now ordinary. For the last 90 minutes, you saw the next Ifs answered. Money crossing borders in seconds, markets settling in real time, AI agents transacting on their own. These are not separate ideas. They are one system. Today, that system is live. The vision you heard is now infrastructure. There is only one question left. What is your ETH? The rules are written. The network is live. The rest is up to you. To the institutions, what will you bring on chain? To the builders, what could not exist until now?
Whatever you can picture, Arc is where it runs. In a moment, for all of you here today, you will actually get a chance to meet the builders, go deeper with the teams behind today. See it, question it, build on it. We wrote the first Ifs. The next ones are yours. Thank you.
You say I do not remember. Familiarity breeds contempt. Do not put me in the basement when I am on the penthouse of your heart. Time is in.
We are live.
All right, guys. We are here at the Arc Mainnet.
It's live.
We're live. Arc Mainnet is live.
It's finally live.
We're live. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here in the heart of New York City in Tribeca. It is Wednesday, September 16th, in standing room-only space here in New York City. Circle kicked off the Arc Mainnet launch with Jeremy Allaire framing why the financial system needs Arc, but not just the current system, but the future of the agentic system as well.
There was an incredible panel, multiple incredible panels, keynotes, and speakers. This entire session was fantastic. I had a chance to listen in. The takeaways are incredible. I mean, if you look at what they have done so far in less than 24 hours, Arc has been live. Closing it on $650 million of USDC that's natively minted on Arc. That's driven by a lot of the applications that we're going to speak with today. That's driven by Morpho. It's driven by Aave. It's driven by a lot of the protocols that are on Arc day one today.
Yeah. I mean, guys, the energy in the air right now is palpable. It is truly a packed-out house here in a beautiful venue in South Manhattan. I mean, the program that we just witnessed ran into partner conversations with institutional players. You had the likes of BlackRock's Robert Mitchnick, Aave's Stani Kulechov, the DTCC. You had Chris Dixon here as well. The vibe in the air, Rob, is simply palpable. We have a stacked lineup of guests for you today. There has been over $650 million of USDC issued on Arc already. That is the Mainnet number. That is not the testnet number, Rob.
There's a couple more numbers that we have. $100 trillion is a big, big number. It's $100 trillion of total USDC transfer volume. That's across USDC globally all time. $100 trillion is nothing to scoff at, of course. They also did the genesis mint, which is 10 billion tokens. This is not transferable. It's not on the open market quite yet. But they did do the genesis mint of the ARC token. I find it absolutely phenomenal because this is one of the first examples that we have of a publicly traded company, Circle, and their Arc blockchain, also with a network token. We'll get into what that is going to look like over the coming weeks and months as more functionality is available. The final number that I have here on USDC, obviously, agentic payments are huge right now. They're starting to find product-market fit.
99.6% of X402 flows have gone through USDC. They are dominating agentic commerce through USDC. 99.6% of X402 flows. We're going to chat.
Incredible. Incredible.
Absolutely.
Incredible. 99.6%. Guys, we have a stacked lineup today. It's truly an honor to be here at the Circle, sorry, the Arc Mainnet live event. We are ready to get the program started. Give us maybe 10, 15 seconds. We're going to keep the energy. We're going to get our first guest, Merlin, the co-founder of Morpho. Shortly after him, we've got Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle. Guys, give us about 10 seconds, 20 seconds, and we'll get fully set up. We'll hit a quick standby, and we'll go.
Perfect.
Alrighty, guys. We're here with Merlin, the co-founder of Morpho. Merlin is one of the first protocols live on Arc day one. Merlin, welcome to the show.
Yeah. Thank you for inviting us. Already $200 million on Morpho today on Arc. Super exciting about that. I think in total on Arc, there's $300 million. Just to have a glimpse on the scale of that. Super exciting.
Talk to us about why it was important for Morpho to be on Arc day one. Obviously, $200 million is a substantial amount. Why was it so important from day one?
Yeah. Because I believe that there's two building blocks in finance. There's the trading side of things, and then there's credit. If you don't have one of those two building blocks, then it's very hard to bootstrap an entire financial ecosystem on top of that. Morpho had to be there first. Now, why Morpho needs Arc? It's because, I mean, they're bringing a lot of privacy things out of the box. There's also many stablecoins, like new currencies that are coming on chain. We'll see a lot of FX type of strategies on top of Morpho. We're super exciting about that.
That's awesome, Merlin. I mean, look, big day, big launch. We're here at the space here in New York City. What does launching on an institutional chain mean for Morpho's strategy?
Well, I would say it's the type of loans that you can actually create on the protocol. Right now, the DeFi space has been really focused on crypto-backed loans, right? Like BTC and ETH and maybe different other assets. But when you have institutions that come on chain, then you have custody backed loans that are available. There is RWA backed loans. But within RWA, you have plenty of different asset types of assets. Now, everyone is talking about stocks. So stocks is one way you have to operate. It is very different from treasuries because maybe stocks are traded on weekends. So how do you report that price? There's many new challenges that come in when you try to tokenize a bunch of different institutional assets. So new challenges, but new opportunities as well.
Yeah, man. I mean, congratulations to the launch with Bitwise, right? The RWA, Morpho Vault is live on Arc today. Bitwise is entering this curator space, which they claim is really getting to be a bit more of an institutional ballgame. This curator space is rapidly growing into some of the largest and smartest financial players in the market. What's your take on this evolution of the curator space as it pertains to your launch today?
Well, I think Morpho we coined the terms of curators like one or two years ago. Our vision around curation is there's 8 billion of people on Earth that have very different risk profiles, very different risk appetites. And if we truly want to meet those risk appetites, there's no way that one size fits all model can handle all that, all those needs and intents in the space. So what we say is we need to expand to open the risk management space to anyone on Earth. And so you have crypto-native firms that will maybe focus on memecoins. There's other firms that are crypto-native, but will focus on crypto-backed loans. And we'll also extend their expertise to new type of assets.
There's also large asset managers that have been doing that off-chain for years or even decades that have truly expertise on treasuries or asset management in general, and then can bring that expertise on chain. And how do you scale to 8 billion of people? We deeply think that it's the only way.
Yeah. What does Morpho need from Arc? This is more than just a normal blockchain. This is something that is trying to be truly transformative. How are you thinking about Arc differently than maybe any other chain launch?
Yeah. I think there is the privacy side where we are actually onboarding a lot of large asset managers or banks on Morpho. The first question is, how do we go on chain? What is our strategy? How do we create credit product? But once you have done that, like an MVP or something like that, then you have to scale that to all your customers. But if you do that, they have privacy constraints. They need to protect the confidentiality of their customers. So if truly you want to scale that to all their customers, you need that privacy layer, which we do not have at the moment. So I expect Arc and us to work together so we can scale those products to a broader ecosystem.
Yeah, man. I mean, look, we were at the Canton Network yesterday. We were at the Avalanche Summit today. It has been a hell of a week for us. We have done a lot of conversations. But you can feel in the air two separate things. One is just broader institutional adoption leading to a bullish undertone for the key exports of this industry: tokenization, stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetuals, vaults, lending, right? These key primitives that we spent six-plus years building on chain now are being rapidly adopted by some of the largest financial institutions in the world. Second, because of that, there is a new set of requirements that is now a part of a mandatory baseline to adopt from the protocol perspective. Privacy is one of them.
What are the other requirements that Morpho is focusing on to really be able to capture this institutional audience and win this market?
Yeah. Privacy is one. I think there's we're releasing Midnight, which is a fixed-rate protocol. That protocol is actually enabling tons of use cases that were not possible on chain before. I'm thinking about receivable back loans, FX hedging, cross-chain arbitrage strategies where you have certainty on the rate you are going to get, custody back loans, and there's many others. But obviously, for all those type of new loans, you need to bring the different stakeholders that are the experts in that space. I don't know, the PSP, the permanent service providers, the credit facility that are operating off-chain, etc. You need to bring those stakeholders and also build the product or the smart contract that connects those stakeholders together so that you can really put that solution into fruition.
Our goal at the moment is connecting the dots and routing those players around Morpho Midnight and routing that liquidity so we create really a truly deep and global network.
Do you see opportunity for that Midnight product on Arc chain?
Sorry.
Do you see opportunity for the Morpho Midnight product on the Arc chain?
On other chains?
On Arc.
On Arc chains. Oh, yeah. Definitely. We're going to release very soon. First things will be, I think, cBTC back loans or custody back loans against BTC. Circle has a lot of cBTC under custody. FX is something I've been talking about, being able to hold USDC, borrow local currencies in your jurisdiction so that you can pay instantly in Argentina, Venezuela, or something like that. Currently working on bringing more markets with plenty of currencies to enable new use cases that are not possible on other chains.
Very cool. Merlin, thank you so much, man. Absolute pleasure. We've chatted from several members of your team. You guys have been a leader in the credit marketplace and vaults as well. We're very, very excited. Congratulations on launching on Arc from day one. You guys have driven $200 million, which is an incredible number. I look forward to $2 billion.
One more thing from me, Merlin. What are your North Star metrics for the Arc launch specifically? Is it the same metrics that you think about when you are doing launches on other blockchains or your broad-based metrics? Give us a sense as to the growth of Morpho this year and last year and what your metrics of success are on Arc.
Yeah. I would say there is two important metrics. It is, of course, active loans because it is where you can actually generate revenue. It is where the borrower demand is really, truly the important. It is where the demand here is. So that is what we are tracking. Then there is a more abstract way, which is the deals and the partners that we are working with. So Arc and Circle is one. We are working with, for instance, on Arc, with Ripio, which is, and Bursar, which has two fintechs. But we are working across the board with many more fintechs and neobanks. Those are actually the one owning the distribution. Those are the one bringing the demand on chain. So that is where we are focusing on. That is what we are happy to.
Coinbase. Coinbase is a fantastic example. You guys have a great partnership with them.
Yeah. Definitely.
Merlin, thank you so much, sir.
Thank you.
Best of luck. Thank you for your time.
I still have some voice, but good luck, guys.
I'm almost out.
Just at the end of the day. Thank you.
I'm almost out.
It's a good sign of the energy here. It's so loud because everyone is so bullish here.
Guys, I mean, we will continue here.
Thanks, Merlin.
Thanks, Merlin. I mean, guys, I mean, we are here. I am telling you, I cannot even get words out. This place is buzzing.
Yeah, it absolutely is.
It's just so let's just be real, guys. We are in a very institutional era of this industry. On top of that, Robbie calls it the legitimization era of this industry. I think that's a very good way to put it. What I would say is that there are certain teams, companies, and products that are strongly positioned to win in this new era. Just as in anything, if there are winners, there are also subsequently losers. We're not going to sit here and be pessimistic, but what I will say is the teams like Morpho, the teams like Circle, the teams like Arc that are building at the intersection of these core exports of our industry will continue to eat the lion's share of attention, of the markets, of the bid from passive and active investors and more.
We continue to harp on this thesis, Rob. We just see this as the core way to think about investing and building in this asset class.
I think what I'm excited about for Arc is that this feels like a truly next-generation blockchain.
Sure.
There's been so many Layer 1s and so many Layer 2s. It feels like a lot of that is played out. But because Arc has been able to take all of the learning moments from so many blockchains that came before them, it feels as if Arc is now able to leapfrog. Very similar to the way that the AI models are able to leapfrog one another. They're able to leapfrog a lot of what these previous blockchains have done. I think part of that is benefiting from the legitimization of the industry.
And you know what? It is quite funny, Rob. In this industry, we have this concept of the second and third mover advantage, right? We try a lot of these concepts the first time around. You just don't know what you don't know. Look at the perps industry, right? Look at other sectors, right? What we currently have, though, is, I believe, the end of the second and third mover advantage. Hear me out. You had this initial iteration of all these products. Then you got to the next iteration that was better because they learned from their exploit or their mistake or their lack of focus or the team got really wealthy early on, etc., right? Or the tokenomics. You keep learning. Then the third round was even better. However, I don't believe that's the case anymore.
I believe that the standout leaders right now in this market are what are going to go and take 70%-80% of the market.
I think what you're describing, there's actually a phenomenon, which is the power law. I think this is a real market-based phenomenon that we've seen play out in so many industries. I don't think blockchains are any different. I think this is absolutely what we're going to see play out. It is part of the reason why a lot of the portfolio constructions nowadays feel so consensus. But it's because there's a compounding effect of consolidation.
That's exactly that. Exactly that.
There's only maybe a dozen viable projects out there doing things the way that they should be done, whether that's token-based.
I don't think you need to be so reductionary. There's a lot of them.
Maybe there's two dozen. Maybe there's two dozen. But the point is that there are so many teams that have, granted, fallen and tried their best, but have not stuck it around for one reason or the other. I think now that we're seeing a consolidation of capital into those on-chain businesses, that means those businesses are in a position to compound at a greater magnitude than any else.
Exactly that. The human brain is not meant to think in exponentials, Rob. We think in linear terms, right? Which is fine. That's understandable. But we are entering the exponential era of digital assets powered by the legitimization of the industry, the institutional adoption, and the real actual awareness, the mass awareness of this industry. It's happening.
We are going to bring up Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle, to talk about it.
Jeremy.
Welcome to the show, Jeremy. This is your show. This is your world.
Great to have you guys here. Congratulations.
Thank you, man. Absolutely.
What a day, Jeremy Allaire. What a day. I mean, look, you started off your talk at the top in the keynote, and you just spoke about this reality that we're entering, which is just this new economy, and specifically about this bifurcated economy, or perhaps that's the way that it's been talked about. You stated this economy is not going to be a split economy. It's going to be on-chain. It's going to be on Arc. Talk to us about your vision here for Arc, the agentic economy, and what's really happening here.
Yeah. I mean, it's stuff we've been thinking about in some ways for a very long time. What got me into this whole space 13 years ago was the idea that these networks were going to be computers and that you're going to be able to put software machines on these computers. If you could actually put real assets like dollars, obviously, and contracts, you could actually kind of construct a software-powered economy. The founding vision was just like there's software-powered communications, commerce, media on the internet, a software-powered economic system would be possible. In many ways, we've been pulling that thread and kind of working on different pieces. I think Arc is, in many ways, it's the full manifestation of that founding vision. We're creating an operating system. It's a network operating system.
Its purpose is to run the full slate of economic activity, not just moving money around, but actually the contracts that run the economy, the decisions that have to be made, the governance mechanism, all these mechanisms that we think about as the building blocks of a firm or an economy can come online. It's this convergence of these other operating systems, probably the most powerful operating systems ever created ever, which is intelligence operating systems, which are extraordinary, and they need each other, right? I think our idea is the agentic economy is these two different operating systems, and they're basically two sides of the same coin. The agentic system is these intelligent systems, and the economic operating systems like Arc provide the trust and verifiability and the actual execution environment for the economic stuff.
In a world of proliferating agents, where agents can do things not just for us as individuals, but actually, we reconstruct what a firm even is. We reconstruct the firm as these orchestrations of agents doing work. The corporations we create are governed on chain. You get this incredible proliferation of output that's possible from that. I think it's the most exciting thing. Chris Dixon and I were talking about it too, which is there's going to be these new types of corporations that they have people, obviously, but a lot of it is going to be AI, and they need this layer. We're building for that. I think I genuinely believe it's not just that developers have AI tools to build stuff faster. It's that actually what they're putting out there are AI agents themselves.
I think you are describing an intelligent economy. Broadly, this is an intelligent revolution. You are describing that it is applicable to not only the economy. Every company is going to implement this. We are going to see the collective ultimately create this step function, which I think Arc is exemplary of. It is a step function increase in blockchains. I think Andy and I were talking about this before you joined here, which is that you had the benefit of hindsight. There has been so many blockchains that have come before. All of that is a learning moment. Now Arc has been able to leapfrog, very similar to the way AI models leapfrog one another. You have been able to leapfrog all of the blockchains that have come before. It truly feels that Arc is a next-generation blockchain.
I mean, I really hope so. I think I use the analogy of mobile. There was 15 years of people building mobile, including massive companies, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, all these guys all around the world, the PalmPilot, the BlackBerry. Everyone thought they had mobile. Everyone is like, "Oh, I have got mobile. I have got apps. I can do this stuff." But it had not really actualized. Then it was like the breakthrough of Android and iOS, these new operating systems. These new operating systems created the surface area, created the user experience, created the developer experience. Enough things converged at the right time that they could pull together, that then they created an environment where people could create incredible new things. That is how I think about what we are doing with Arc. I really genuinely do.
I think this is an amazing environment for people who want to create and build. We really feel like we did have the benefit of hindsight. We have seen we have the most cross-platform app in the world in blockchain. USDC is the most cross-platform thing out there. So we care about that. We know about that. That is actually even interesting. Interoperability is a deep, deep, deep part of Arc. If you issue an asset on Arc, you can ride on CCTP and distribute your asset to over 20 networks. So we view even Arc, we want to run a lot on, but people are going to distribute stuff all around the world in other places too.
Yeah. I think the mobile analogy is a great one because it describes a technology that is truly general and flexible enough to support non-skeuomorphic use cases. So what you are describing, I mean, the unique advantages, we have it here, gas and digital dollars, sub-second finality, opt-in privacy, post-quantum resilience, agent-ready, and assets and interop. These are the unique value propositions that make Arc different from other blockchains. Those are what make Arc unique. My question is, what is the implications? What is now possible because Arc has implemented these unique advantages?
Well, I mean, we've all talked about when does the actual financial system come onto these networks? We've needed these things. The companies that want to do it, they need privacy. They need an operational environment where they're not dealing with volatile cryptocurrencies. They need to know that the infrastructure is robust and operated as a financial market utility infrastructure. Today, they need to know that when they're building and deploying, it has a safety harness, security harness, and AI tooling that's all right there. It's sort of meeting the mainstream where it is. We've been listening to that for years. USDC gave us a front-row seat because that was the first place institutions were coming. They were like, "Okay, we now have a regulated way to move money around." That was the first place that they were coming.
Tokenized assets started coming and all those integrating with USDC. We've been close to this for a very long time. I think it's just like listening to the market, listening to customers.
Yeah. Just kind of build off what Rob's question and your answer here, Jeremy, you're kind of putting together quite the puzzle here. You started with USDC and Circle. It's grown to an enormous size, right? 99.6% of all X402 transactions on USDC, right? You've expanded this now globally, right? You've done the regulated path. You've got things done the right way. Obviously, clarity would have been an amazing thing yesterday, but here we are. We still move forward with innovation exemptions from the SEC and CFTC. Now you've got Arc. There's also a bit of the OS system that you speak about. What are we really building here, Jeremy? You're not just building a stablecoin. You're not just building a blockchain. What is the bigger picture?
I know I kind of asked at the top, but with the parts that you've got now, what are you really constructing for this company?
You know, when I started the company and got started, my mental model was there is internet technology platform companies, and they have a mixture of things. They run platforms. They run applications. They run core services. And they are all anchored in different areas. So you have commerce was anchored around Amazon, and communications was anchored around Facebook, and information discovery and knowledge was anchored around Google, and productivity was anchored around Microsoft, and mobile was anchored around Apple. These big tech companies were all anchored around their core utility. And my belief back then was if this plays out, there is going to be internet platform companies that are anchored around the economic system and the financial system. And there will be internet-scale platform utilities that are in the same way that those companies change communications and media and commerce and software and so on.
There is an opportunity to do that with the financial and economic system. And I believe that that sort of stands as a big opportunity. I do not think we are the only company like that. There is going to be a lot of, I think, a number of great internet platform companies that are building the economy of the future. There are some great, amazing companies. But that is what I think we see. And so we want to provide that platform infrastructure. We want to provide the best digital assets. We want to build applications that are useful for people. But in order for this to work, it has to be, unlike the centralized platforms of the world, it has to be something that is broadly participated in. The ownership of it, the distribution of it, the value creation, the governance.
ARC is very, very different than a traditional internet technology model because it is built on the ideology of blockchain networks and open source and things like that. And so it is a different take on that and something, again, we have learned a lot from the last 10, 15 years as well.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Jeremy Allaire, I cannot help but to think this, the evolution of what ARC is going to look like, it is going to look a lot more like an alternative financial ecosystem rather than just a crypto asset, crypto-only ecosystem.
100%.
We're starting with USDC as the foundation. We're going to have tokenized assets.
Tokenized assets, currencies.
Talk to us about what this.
Yeah. I mean, look, I think one of the things is I think we issue some of the world's leading assets, the biggest digital dollar, the biggest digital euro, the biggest tokenized money market fund. We now have tokenized Bitcoin serving cirBTC, which is really exciting and is anchored in our national trust bank and the custody there, bankruptcy remote. It's like a great programmable Bitcoin. But the number of people who are issuing tokenized equities day one, there's a whole bunch. The DTCC, which is the heart and soul of securities in the global financial system, coming to Arc, the biggest asset manager issuing their assets on Arc. There's like 12 or 16 foreign currency stablecoins launching on Arc. There's an FX primitive on Arc. There's ETFs, bond issuers, credit issuers. So we're seeing all of these different categories coming. That's very exciting.
We are obviously at the very start. I think if there is an asset to be tokenized, it should be on Arc. We give asset issuers something very, very powerful. We give them the best liquidity against digital dollars in the world because of our role with USDC and the way that USDC works on Arc. We give them distribution. If I am BlackRock and I issue a tokenized ETF on Arc, I can choose. I want to put it I want to make it available on HyperEVM. I want to make it available on Base. I want to make it available on Solana. I want to make it available in these places. It manages that distribution and liquidity across those because CCTP is the biggest interop highway on blockchains. We just open the highway to everyone else's cars, basically.
Jeremy, first of all, I just want to say, man, Hyperliquid on the balance sheet of Circle is an absolute Chad move, man. Awesome. As we come to a wrap, Jeremy, just thinking about kind of where we go from here. Ending on 2026, stablecoin supply outstanding, relatively stagnant. As you and I know, this is maybe your fourth cycle. This is my third. A flat stablecoin supply in a bear market is a good thing. That is okay, right?
Yeah. I mean, we talked to people in the public market, ask us about this, all this. We have seen some decoupling, right? Stablecoin utility and payments and settlement has grown and grown and grown. When there is not as much risk capital, so that is more static. The stablecoin supply has been pretty steady. The stablecoin payment volumes are growing. We are seeing the transaction volumes on so many different fronts growing. That is great, right? That is fundamental utility. Actually, we talked about this after our last earnings, which was we had a record amount of minting and redemption. That is important because if you have $150 billion minted and $150 billion redeemed, that is liquid pipes. It means money can easily come in and out. It is interoperability with the financial system.
It shows that the liquidity and the interoperability with real-world payment systems is working and growing. That is really.
That's what matters to you.
There's evidence. There's $100 trillion in USD transfer volume all time in totality. You don't get there with a fluke. You get there with pure product market fit, exactly what you're describing. You've gone through exponential growth. We're very, very pleased to be a part of it. Congratulations on Arc.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. So glad you guys could be here today.
Huge launch. Thank you, Jeremy.
Really awesome. I hope you got to chat with a lot of good people.
Yeah, man. Yeah, man. Great to see you, buddy. Come on.
Great to see you guys.
See you again soon. Thanks so much.
Bye-bye.
All right. They are clapping it up for him behind the scenes. How can you not? $100 trillion? $100 trillion in USD transfer volume. This is the thing that is going to bring them the next step function change.
I was trying to get to his North Star.
Yeah. I mean, look.
What does he want Circle to get to this year? What does he want USDC to get to?
I think our pre-contact for that was extremely relevant because it ends up at a place where you think about exponentials, right? Once you get into a position where you're thinking about compounding, our next guest, you guys have seen him before, he's also familiar with the compounding of exponential growth.
Big Stani.
How are you, Stani?
Good to see you.
Welcome back. Welcome back. Good to see you. We were just chatting with Jeremy about what it takes to get to $100 trillion in transfer volume for USDC. He has the benefit of 10 to 15 years of hindsight where he is able to learn from some of his predecessors and leapfrog a lot of them. He has been in a position where he has been able to capitalize on exponential growth. In his case, stablecoins. In your case, lending market. I mean, take us through what it is like to exist in an opportunity where you have exponential growth at your fingertips. How do you start to change your mind so that you are no longer thinking in terms of linear growth, but you start to understand the compounding effect and you start to think in exponentials?
I think you have to broaden your horizon. One of the most important things we learned is that is basically that. One of the things we learned is that we have to go beyond the existing crypto assets. We believe that the crypto market will grow significantly. Over time, you will have more crypto custody. You have borrowing and lending and a lot of these sort of more traditional institutional players and all the way to the banks. Asset managers play a big role. Down the line, what I really think is going to happen is that all finance is coming on chain. This means a lot of assets in form of tokenization. For us, we are no longer just servicing the sort of crypto asset space. We are servicing all assets.
It is just a question of go-to-market in terms of which assets will come first into on-chain. Stablecoins are important because that is the cash leg. More importantly, stablecoins already have regulation. That is solved. Now it is more about how do we get more adoption and tokenization and bring more value on-chain.
Yeah. Stani, in that lens, in this all-of-finances coming on-chain lens, in this regulated lens, we kind of spoke about this earlier today. Specifically with Arc, what is different about Arc to you? I mean, you guys put Aave on Polygon and 2020 is the first non-Ethereum deployment. I remember just racing over there. Now we are in this multi-chain world, Stani. What feels different about Arc? They have the benefit of watching a lot of chains launch. They obviously have this backing of Circle and USDC. From the builder perspective, from the launch perspective, from the product, what do you think makes this a standout if so?
It is so packed here. The whole place is so full. It is almost impossible to hear. You have to repeat that. I mean, it is packed here.
Yeah, yeah. Good. Basically, what makes Arc different? You launched Aave on Polygon back in 2020 as one of the first non-Ethereum chains. Now you have gone through multiple iterations. Why is Arc different? What makes it such an important launch?
No, it is quite exciting because Arc has some interesting properties that are fit for a sort of with the right form factor for institutions and sort of the new wave of adoption. So one of the important things is that a lot of the counterparties are running the chain by being validators. Also, Arc has a stablecoin as the settlement currency. That is really important. The last important piece is privacy. So privacy is quite important when it comes to capital markets and comes to actually for the institutional adoption. That plays a very big role. I think that is because it is EVM compliant. It is also easy for developers like Aave to come and build the next generation of primitives on Arc directly.
Yeah. Love it. Love it. I will speak up a little louder, Stani. When you think about the stablecoin landscape and the growth, I was telling Jeremy that we have only seen a slight stagnation in the total outstanding supply this year of stablecoins, which is pretty good for a bear market, right? Usually, it goes down a little bit. What do you expect that to look like next year? How do you expect Aave to capture that growth?
Yeah. I think there are different ways to measure stablecoin adoption. One is basically the transaction volume. I would say that probably will play a very big part of Arc and Circle. For us, what we measure a lot is basically how to use stablecoins as the sort of a savings leg, the cash leg of on-chain. I think what will really grow that is the ability to use stablecoins as a way to unlock capital from tokenized assets. We are going to move from just building for crypto assets to all assets. Being able to collateralize your assets on-chain and borrow against is a way to grow stablecoin demand. That is going to be really centric for what we are going to do with Arc and building new credit primitives and also connecting into payments.
Agentic AI is going to be very exciting on Arc because the Circle team, the Arc team, they are all focusing also on how to progress agentic payments ecosystem. Credit is going to be a big part of that.
It certainly is. You were up there on stage with BlackRock and DTCC. The moderator said, "Hey, you guys have been building your very instrumental in finance. What does it mean for Aave to be on the same playing field as two financial institutions that essentially, I mean, for lack of a better term, run the world?
No, I think it's a dream come true. When I started building in DeFi in the early days, I would never expect seeing sort of these bigger institutions like DTCC, BlackRock, and basically the biggest institutions of the world really embracing on-chain. This is super exciting for a technologist and sort of financial engineer like me to be able to participate. I'm super excited. I think this is the future of finance. Aave is going to be a big part of this adoption. We're very excited.
Yeah. Stani, on the agentic side, you have this thesis of abundance, which I really like. Jeremy shares a similar thesis with regards to the abundance of intelligence and then how that pertains to Arc. Talk to us about what let's say this Arc Jeremy nails this Arc thesis. There's millions of agents on Arc. What is Aave's agentic finance plan? How does Aave participate in the agentic economy to unleash the world's credit markets to fund prosperity, ideas, etc.?
Yeah. Funding abundance is basically a thesis that I wrote a while ago. Basically, it means that the world is heading towards abundance, meaning access to intelligence at an equal basis. So everyone has the ability to use AI, intelligence at their disposal, information with the internet, almost like a free energy from solar and batteries, and also labor with robotics. So we're going to go into a world where we have unlimited amount of resources and we have this abundance of resources. Agentic AI is basically part of that because the intelligence layer is going to work for us and the money going to work for us on all this transaction is going to move to an agentic world. Now, where Aave comes into your place is basically funding these abundance assets. The transition is going to take 50 years, probably multiple decades.
If Aave can actually fund the world towards abundance and that transition by a decade, moving it faster, that is the world where we want to live in and back the future.
I don't mean to beat around the bush, but on the agentic side, how does that actually work? Will an agent be able to so I've got an open call, right? But I haven't yet got a crypto wallet associated with my agent. But is there a world where I can do an LLM prompt and perhaps this exists already and go deposit some capital on Aave on an Ethereum address on Arc? Is that something that is happening now, tomorrow, next year? What is that timeline or what does that reality look like?
Yeah. No, I think the most important part when it comes to agentic world and finance is actually credit and decision-making on credit. I believe that AI is going to be making the best decisions on where to allocate capital and credits. And that is the future. So we launched the MCP server, which means that you can get data through your AI agents from Aave. You can basically allocate capital. You can issue really management of funds and stablecoins. And the next thing is actually bringing the decision-making layer as well. So that is where I think that on-chain world, AI, and credit will actually combine.
Well, Stani, it's always a pleasure to have you once a quarter, maybe once every six months, but twice in a day is a true treat, man.
Stani, I have a lot to say. I mean, we're building the future of finance.
I got one more for you. It is a quick one. Our team put this question together, but I do think it is a good one. It says a year from now, what number tells you that the Arc deployment was worth doing? What is our North Star metric? What are we looking to achieve here in one year of Aave on Arc?
I think one interesting piece is obviously the total credit that is issued on Arc. I also would love to measure outside of lending and credit is that how much of that capital is automated and under AI agents. That is a very exciting metric as well. If we will see even 25% of that capital, 25%-50% managed under automated AI agent, that will be pretty awesome.
Yeah. Wow. That is an interesting number. Stani, thank you so much.
Thank you, Dan.
Stani, man. Always a pleasure. I hope to see you again soon.
Thank you so much.
Yes. Thanks, man. There it is, man. Here's Stani's in one day, guys. We are fired up, Rob. We will see you at Aave. All righty, guys. Arc Mainnet is still heaving. This place is alive and well. I must say, guys, this specific event feels like the future of digital asset events. This is why. This is a highly curated, invite-only specific event for teams, protocols, investors, and builders on a specific platform with one goal and shared interest, with a highly curated setup, extremely professional. It is not overcrowded. It just truly feels like the Arc events team went above and beyond to deliver a futuristic feel as well as a totally relaxed vibe that still encapsulates what makes this industry great, which is the weirdness, the fun, the esoteric people, while also maintaining a professional feel that would attract institutional allocators, investors alike.
I think this has been one of my favorite events in this industry up till now. We are only about a third way through our show here. Well, I want to build on what you are saying because I absolutely agree. It feels like Arc has curated an event that truly feels like a technological upgrade. We are going to talk about this difference between technology, which is kind of where we have came from, and finance, which is what we find ourselves talking a lot about today because ultimately this is fintech. We have Sid.
Yes, we do.
The co-founder and CEO of Maple, Sid, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Sid, good to have you back.
Good to be back.
There we go. Sid the man. All right, Sid. Where are we? Because we started out, you've been on the show several times. We started out very early on. This was fundamentally a technological shift, but it feels like we've done all of the heavy lifting on the technology side. Now most of the work to do is on the finance side. Where do you find that we are on this spectrum, more towards the finance side and more towards the tech side?
I think we're definitely shifting more towards the finance side today. I mean, as you said, a lot of the heavy lifting has been done on the tech side. People are now relatively comfortable with things like stablecoins. They accept that banks in particular have accepted that they need to meet customers where they are. They're looking at doing their own stablecoins, tokenized deposits. I think now a lot of the emphasis is on education, whether it's asset managers, banks, other financial services firms, and also structuring. How do you manage credit risk? How do you manage disclosures? How do you manage liquidity? Those are generally where most of the conversations we have today are trending.
Yeah, man. I mean, you guys have a traditional background. I know that the team has spent quite a bit of time in the traditional space, which is now proving to be a competitive advantage for the team, given the era that we're in. The suit looks great on you, Sid. Talk to us about this Arc deployment, what this means to Maple, how you think about this chain. It feels a little bit different, Sid. It feels a little bit more, for lack of a better term, finance and professional and institutional. What does this deployment mean for Maple's business?
Well, I mean, we're tremendously excited about the Arc deployment. I mean, I recall speaking with Jeremy Allaire on a podcast a few years ago where we discussed the long tail of assets. You need to have the right type of infrastructure to get the long tail of assets on-chain and get them accessible for both institutional and high-net-worth investors and allocators. For us at Maple, we view Arc as the next leg in that. We've always been institutionally oriented. All of our borrowers are institutional. I think they're really excited by having a chain and infrastructure where fees are paid in USDC. They don't have to manage holding other crypto assets in order to pay fees.
It's with stablecoin now that has a tremendous amount of track record and, for lack of a better word, Lindy effect behind it. That's where I see that.
Yeah. Talk to us a bit about the long tail of assets because it feels as if we're in the midst of this tokenization supercycle. The way that we see tokenization progressing is essentially starting with the least risky and then moving down the risk curve, down the long tail. We're starting to see product-market fit from some of the asset classes on that long tail, most notably some tokenized equities, stock token, derivatives, securities starting to become more and more popular. As we think about the long tail of assets, what does that look like as we onboard them into the lending and credit facilities that exist on-chain such as Maple?
I think it's a great point. You can see three years ago, we began with tokenized T-bills. We've now progressed. We had tokenized funds, tokenized ETFs. Now we saw a bit of a renaissance or an explosion of appetite for tokenized equities. As you said, we're moving further along the risk curve to assets that are less conservative, obviously, than T-bills. I think the way we look at it is we're very excited about being able to lend against tokenized RWAs, real-world assets. We keep an eye on things like tokenized equities because we've lent for the longest time against the large caps, BTC, ETH. We're now seeing that the customer wants tokenized NVIDIA. We're here. We want to be agnostic to this. We want to be here ready to lend against the assets they want.
We could lend against tokenized NVIDIA, tokenized SK hynix, and these other equities. We view our role as just being able to facilitate lending. We do not have to be opinionated about what the asset is. What we are now seeing is that there is a larger demand. As the market of tokenized equities and other tokenized real-world assets grows, we can now deal in institutional size. Our type of clients, Maple is doing $25 million up to $500 million loans. We just really need that scale to come through.
Yeah. I appreciate the thorough answer. I can listen to you all day, Sid, man. I just love the accent. $4.6 billion AUM closing out the first half of the year. Some call it the comeback of the century. Others just call it Sid mode. What is going on here? How did this happen? What do you expect to come from Arc launch? How do you expect the proliferation of stablecoin into the Arc chain as well as just the growth into this next year? How is that going to affect your bottom line?
For us, this is a fantastic opportunity for distribution. We have had a very close relationship with the Circle team and the Arc team for a long time. Circle USDC is our biggest asset, over $1 billion, one of the largest stablecoin yield products in the DeFi market. We think Arc will unlock a lot more demand and access to this asset. I think to our point earlier, having a more institutionally oriented chain that institutions are happy to use, they can pay their gas fees in stablecoins. For us, we view it as like this is probably one of the best ways to expand the pie. We have seen that fintechs now want to offer stablecoin yield to their customers. We think that institutions are not going to be far behind that.
They need ways to manage their cash balances and what is better to do that with than stablecoins. You can send it anywhere in the world instantly.
Yeah, Sid. I mean, I was at a separate conference earlier in the week and heard an institutional allocator said, "We'd like to settle a yard a day of tokenized money markets by next year.
Very important.
By next year. You know what I mean?
No, we would love that. I mean, for us, on the bottom line, Maple makes its money from the spread between what we lend out at and what we pass on to users. We want to pay users the best yield so that we can grow the asset base. Ultimately, that kind of helps Maple's bottom line at the end of the day. It's all about revenue these days.
One of the founders that we had on earlier in the week as well was kind of talking about the generality of these protocols and was essentially generalizing this to the extent of basically, look, these on-chain protocols, they have a cost of capital. The whole goal is to acquire capital at a cheap cost, try to build up as much trust as possible to get pretty much capital at SOFR and then increase some basis. That is the entire game. We have seen that replicated across chains and across protocols. Is it really that simple or is there more than meets the eye to building these protocols?
I would love it if it was that simple. My life would be a lot easier and I would be getting a lot more sleep. It is true that asset managers and this is one of the we love new technology, but at the end of the day, you have to be able to do things either cheaper, faster, or better than what comes before. What a lot of the asset managers we talk to are really excited about when it comes to on-chain finance is being able to access cost of capital cheaply. They could do looping. They can tokenize their funds and access DeFi users. For us, we are happy to support that. We want to do as we want to do as much lending as possible.
But you have to kind of balance the other side of the market, which is you have to pay out a good yield to users. That is ultimately what is going to bring more users to Arc, more users to Circle USDC on Arc.
Understood. It sounds a lot more simple than it is. Definitely, definitely understood. One of the things that Jeremy said when he came on earlier and described what it was like launching this is that he built several unique value propositions into Arc that are not available on other chains. I have them all here, like gas and digital dollars, gas and stablecoins, something that you mentioned, sub-second finality, privacy, and many others. But what I am curious about is as you have seen more of these alternative assets get tokenized, looking at some of the stock token, tokenized equities, things on the longer tail of assets, we have seen wild use cases. We have seen stock tokens paired with meme coins and we have seen dividends distributed to token holders. We have seen wild use cases that I think none of us really expected until they were there and they existed.
I am curious how much you think credit and lending can play a role in what we are seeing get built out with some of these alternative asset classes. Granted, equities is not an alternative asset. That is a very poor asset class. I guess what I am saying is that as we build out tokenized asset classes on-chain that are not crypto-native, how much of a role does credit and lending play in those asset classes?
I mean, credit plays a very fundamental role in that it allows the mobility of these assets. Going right back to the original value proposition behind Bitcoin-backed loans, it was, hey, be able to get liquidity against your Bitcoin while still keeping access to the upside. The same proposition holds for tokenized equities and for some of these other more esoteric assets coming on-chain. Keep your upside, defer the tax obligation, and get liquidity to either hedge or diversify your portfolio. We have seen demand from professional asset managers and hedge funds who want to be able to loop an asset. They want to be able to lever it up. Obviously, leverage can be a bad thing if taken to an extreme. Done prudently, this is essentially how the entire real estate market globally works. You take prudent leverage.
We are happy to support those asset managers to increase their returns. It helps mobility. It helps the stablecoins flow around the ecosystem.
Yep. I love it, Sid. Last thing from me, man. I mean, look, I have been vocally bullish for months. Robbie and I have been just accumulating crypto assets as much as we possibly can throughout this bear. I think people are still sidelined. I think we are still in disbelief. I think people have forgotten about the reflexivity of this asset class and what we can deliver at scale, especially given the products and exports that we have now. Sid, where are we at, man? Are you bullish? What is going on? I feel like we are in a secular trend now due to the proliferation of tokenization and stablecoins broadly as well as now perps. We now have a three-headed dragon that is not a four-year cycle dragon. This is a multiple-decade-long megatrend that we are now at the ground floor of. That is my take. What is yours, Sid?
Well, preaching to the choir, I would say overall, but I agree with you. I think, look, we went through a bit of a bear period. That was a time to kind of accumulate, reposition, and continue building. But when we look at the conversations we have with fintechs, with asset managers, with banks, what we see is that the cat is out of the bag. Notwithstanding what happened with Clarity yesterday, we will get rulemaking. These projects take time at these banks and traditional players. So they have to think ahead in terms of years. They are building. I haven't seen any slowdown in the traction on that front. We see banks wanting to tokenize deposits. We see asset managers wanting to tokenize their assets. They view that they have to have a product that caters to crypto-native users.
I think that's only going to continue and accelerate.
Here we are. I will tell you, Sid, you have a token holder here. We are not sidelined. I believe Maple is one of the few, I said a dozen earlier, maybe it is two dozen, but one of the few companies out there that is benefiting from the legitimization of the industry and has what it takes to survive. Thanks for spending some time with us.
Thanks for having me, Sid.
Thanks for launching on Arc day one. We will see you again soon. Always lovely talking to Sid, man. Love that guy.
Oh, great guy.
I mean, great project.
Great guy.
Biggest string of bullish interviews today. I know we are not like confirmed bull market or whatever you guys want to say, but I am telling you from the ground floor right now, the energy is palpable. The conversations are flowing in a way. Robbie and I know, right? We do this every single day. There are periods where the conversations require a bit of pushing, a bit of pulling, a bit of pushing, a bit of pulling. It is just energy from every speaker today at the Arc event in general. Guys, we are absolutely flowing, Rob.
Yeah, absolutely flowing. I mean, it is fun. I like your tweet. You said, "Are we having fun yet?" I will tell you, Andy, I am having fun again.
I know. Fun and winning is contagious, guys.
It certainly is. It certainly is.
Fun is contagious.
People call it different things. They call it animal spirits. They call it different things. I am having fun again. I think we feel that in all of our guests too.
100%.
They come on. You are absolutely right. We are not having to pull from them anymore. They are here, they have what it takes because it means that they have survived apathy. They have survived the bear market. There is a reason that there is this paradigm shift in the energy in these rooms. We hear it in the conversations. We see it in the markets. We see it in the products that are built and deployed. Ultimately, this is what starts to compound again.
Exactly. It starts with the energy. It starts with people building things. It starts with big launches. We will look back and be like, a year from now, we will be like, "Wow, the Circle Arc Mainnet launch was at the beginning of what has become one of the largest booms in stablecoins in terms of outstanding supply. The beginning of some of the largest booms of agentic finance of what is to come.
We just cracked 650.
650 million.
We are literally seeing USDC get minted on Arc as we speak, natively issued on Arc. $650 million of USDC on Arc. I mean, that is up $237,000 since we have started the stream. These use cases are literally picking up steam and picking up traction as we speak. We are seeing the USDC trickle in.
Guys, I mean, I got to say, our next guest, Bhaji, has gone through the ringer and has built an amazing product in the tokenization space. We are happy to have her up. Bhaji is a friend of the show. She has been a colleague, a friend, and more. Bhaji , welcome to the show. Good to have you.
Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me back.
You're our tallest guest so far. So the mic is at a very appropriate height. Thank you so much.
I feel so good. Tallest, funniest, nicest, smartest, most innovative.
Exactly. There you go. No dispute over here. And the CEO and co-founder of Centrifuge.
Can I just start with a little bit more of a relaxed thing? I put out a tweet today, Bhaji, and it said, "Hot take. I think it's time to drop the term RWAs. They're just assets." What's your take?
I love it. I mean, I've always hated the term RWAs, but it's like everybody understands it. Everybody knows it. But the reality is when we're successful as an industry, there's no Chatbot, there's no DeFi, there's no real-world assets, there's no crypto assets. It's just finance and it's just assets. Are we there? Are you calling it?
I think we're at the bottom here.
I think this is the top of RWAs.
It is the bottom of the number of assets on-chain. We are making new highs.
I agree.
The bottom is a good thing.
Absolutely. Exactly.
Bhaji, you came on the show recently and talked through some of the transformations that we are seeing from Centrifuge. We have heard about everyone's deployments on Arc today. Why do not we start with some of the transformations that are going on internally at Centrifuge? Maybe you can just take us inside, give us some of the recent developments, and then we will let that take us naturally into everything that we are seeing in the room today.
Yeah, absolutely. Centrifuge is a crypto-native tokenization platform. What that means is that we started with how do we build interesting use cases? How do we create liquidity? How do we create utility? How do we create access to these new products? Then how do we retrofit that into what these products are and how we can bring them on-chain? So we are really excited for days like today where we are here with Circle, with Arc, where there is this real convergence of institutional adoption. BlackRock is on the stage. DTCC is on the stage. Our partner Janus is a validator. The right institutions are in the room building on this technology. But then also, interesting DeFi use cases. Morpho is on stage and Aave is on stage.
What that means for Centrifuge and what that means for the ecosystem is that we have this convergence and the institutions are here and the use case is here. That is where we really unlock the growth.
I totally agree. You guys have had a great run this year through the bear markets. The thing is, I do not believe you have been in too much of a bear market, right? Your business line is dealing with the institutional allocation and the tokenization of assets. Frankly, it has been just nonstop for you and for the industry at large. You guys are launching on Arc day one, also have an amazing partnership with Coinbase. What does this Arc launch mean to you? How does this help Centrifuge's broader goals and bottom line?
One of the things we've loved most about our conversations with Circle over the last year is they've come to us around how can we make Arc an ecosystem that's perfect for real-world assets, or assets, should I say? Sorry. Oh, I'm so slow. So that's like, okay, let's think about how do we create liquidity? How do we enable lending? How do we use USDC? How do we use Circle Mint? How do we use the infrastructure and the tools that Circle uniquely has to create an environment that is perfect for real-world assets? We're bringing day one, we have our Janus products live, which is JAAA and JTRSY. We have our New York Life products live, which is high-yield bond fund. We're bringing our products into the ecosystem from day one. Then we're connecting them into DeFi. So they're live in Morpho.
They're live in Aave. Dialectic and Steakhouse are curating markets that have these products as part of the overall exposure, whether that's just RWA markets or general markets that have some RWA to kind of balance that yield.
What are the network effects of having those products in those core DeFi protocols where they're resilient and they have utility, but having that in the same ecosystem as a BlackRock and a DTCC? What are some of the compounding effects or the network effects that end up scaling those products beyond what could have been possible otherwise?
We just need trust in the ecosystem. A lot of the technology understanding and those conversations are behind us. It's not a matter of should I tokenize products or not. It's a matter of is now the time to put my reputation on the line of building these strategies. The more large institutions with strong brands that are actively building, the stronger the momentum is for everyone else to build. Then the stronger the Fomo becomes of like, I have to do this now, otherwise I'm going to miss out. I think the network effects are this multiple exposure opportunity where it goes beyond just connecting different assets like trading BUIDL for JTRSY or any asset that wants to be interconnected. But then it also just creates this strong community and this strong brand and this eagerness for everyone to participate actively.
Are the benefits primarily consumer behavior and brand trust? Just to double-click, obviously, those provide those network and social benefits. As you think about what is possible as these product stacks converge, what can you see as some sort of integration or some sort of interplay between the product stack that BlackRock has as they tokenize more of their ETFs, as they bring on more products on board? How do you see Centrifuge potentially working or combining forces with what the BlackRocks and the DTCCs have? Something maybe more tangible than the brand trust that they have.
Yeah, yeah. I'll give an interesting example. Centrifuge is known for tokenization. What we're not as well known for is Vault. Vault is like a keyword. Everybody's talking about it. There are so many different definitions. How we think about Vault is it's an extension of our tokenization platform. Asset managers, Janus Henderson announced their Vault strategy two weeks ago. New York Life was on stage with me at the Real-World Asset Summit talking about their Vault strategy. They're viewing Vault as the next fund infrastructure where they can create infinite portfolios. So every single customer, every end user can have a custom portfolio that's enabled because it's based on a program that can be developed from the asset manager. So it's a fundamentally different fund wrapper that's like what ETFs to the mutual funds, Vault will do to ETFs.
That's the alpha is like you don't just tokenize assets, but you actually create and issue your products natively on-chain.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, thinking about Arc specifically here, you guys are live on a couple of chains for sure. A lot of your activity is in a couple of chains. Arc is going to be the home for Circle's agentic economy, right? We spoke to Jeremy Allaire about that. He's very excited about this kind of merging of the agentic world and the blockchain world. He's arguing that it's not two separate worlds, right? It is one world. Let's say if they nail this, if Arc explodes into the TVL users' agentic activity.
When.
When, right. Not RWAs, but how does Centrifuge capture that asset pool? How do you capture that agentic user base? How do you capture that transaction volume? How do you capture that TVL? What's your kind of strategy here to go to market and hit it hard?
Yeah. I mean, agents could be the big unlock that we've been waiting for as an industry. Agents need stablecoins. Stablecoins need tokenized assets. So when the agentic economy picks up and agents are driving this investment behavior, they want access to every single tokenized product. They want to be able to access the S&P 500. They want to be able to access JAAA, every single ETF, every single stock, every single fund, all these unique esoteric assets that we're bringing into the ecosystem because they need to interact in real time all on-chain. So that's the incredible promise is that when we build an ecosystem that really thrives for agents, that is what increases demand for stablecoins and tokenization at this inflection that we're just like we've been waiting for for many, many years.
I love it. I love it. We have it on the run of show. We got to ask. Token versus equity, you're going through this whole process. I'm sure there's legalities you can't speak about. Just give us the high level. What's happening? What's your view here?
Yeah, yeah. Centrifuge just completed a first-ever governance proposal, governance process snapshot vote to convert our token into equity. We had 98% positive support. We had like 67 million votes, which is four times higher than any other participation in a governance proposal. So what happened is that the industry and the need for the business that we're creating has changed so significantly. So as tokenization as an industry matured and as Centrifuge as a business matured, we realized that the way in which we need to service the customers who are coming on-chain, and primarily that's the Janus Hendersons and Apollos and New York Lifes of the world, they need a centralized regulated counterparty that they can do diligence on, that they can underwrite, that they can partner with as they're building their tokenization strategy. So we were only a token and we were not equity.
And we were very intentional about that because we believe that one value accrual mechanism is the answer, whether that is token or equity. There is some businesses where it makes a lot of sense for it to be token. For Centrifuge, it was holding us back. It was holding us back from raising capital from inbound investors that want exposure to tokenization. It was holding us back from working with asset managers who cannot by internal rules work with a business that is governed by a token because of the risk that that creates. So we had to make a decision of what do we do? Do we create an equity business in addition to our token business so that we can service these clients? But that goes against our ethos. Or do we create a new structure where actually our token holders can become shareholders?
They can participate in this new equity business. Then we can structure Centrifuge for where we are going in the future.
I mean, I think you spoke to Guy Young from Ethena today about his token model. They just fully bought out all the investors and were like, here is what we have. Here is our buyback plan. Here is our token plan. There is no token versus equity. This is what the industry is demanding. Otherwise, your asset is not going to get a bid. On your side, it is more of like, here is the reality of the institutional world that we are abiding by. There is simply no framework for us to be able to exist in this world with what we have. Necessary decision, acknowledgment, humility to be able to make the decision and then execute it. So props to you for that. I hope that continued process goes well.
Yeah.
Any learning moments? Just a piece of advice. I mean, you are certainly not alone.
Yeah, that is for sure.
The companies and the tokens that are out there that probably should do what you did, but are too scared to do what you did, can you help them at all? What kind of advice do you have for them maybe considering going on a similar path?
Yeah. I mean, it is hard to be first. We took a lot of arrows for people. We are trying our best to create a fair structure. As part of that, we are learning a lot. What I will say to anybody else who is considering doing it is talk to us because we can do it through our platform. We have the ability to manage the share registry. We have a Transfer Agent license. You can hold all of your tokenized equities on Centrifuge. We have the ecosystem around us. So we have the legal counsel. We have the securities lawyers. We have CoinList as a partner. We have Galaxy Digital as a partner. So we have spent a lot of time bringing the right folks together who can shape this structure.
Doing that by bringing in folks who deeply understand and care about crypto markets that can help ensure we are doing this in the most fair way. We have actually talked to a lot of founders already that are asking me a lot of these questions. We have talked to a lot of VCs who are saying they are advising their portfolio companies on how to do it. I think the future is either token or equity, not token and equity. For Guy Young with Ethena, it makes a ton of sense for them to be token. For Centrifuge, it makes a ton of sense for us to be equity.
Yep. Love it. Bhaji, congrats on the launch.
Congrats on the launch. One more, just because you mentioned it, and for some reason I had forgotten, and the regulatory stuff is very played out, but Centrifuge is a transfer agent and the SEC is looking very deeply at modernizing some of the transfer agent rules. Just give us your reaction to what you're hearing from the regulatory body, specifically the SEC, on what they're doing to the transfer agent regulation.
Yeah. It's a shame clarity in the past. We know that. But we've been preparing for both outcomes for a long time. What's positive is that the rulemaking around the transfer agent and the need for creating digital transfer agents, creating tokenized share classes, having clear understanding of how we can bring blockchain infrastructure into the traditional fund platform, that is understood to be the direction of travel. That's been decoupled from the outcome of clarity. We're having a lot of really positive conversations around how can we create not just tokenized share classes, but then what can we do with those? How can we ensure that they're compatible on DeFi? And how can we ensure that we're bringing them to the right audiences in the right ways? It's very positive.
This ship is going to sail, whether it's clarity or innovation exemptions. Atkins already came out today and put a post on X saying like, look, we're ready to go.
There's no turning back.
I think it's coming this week. I think we get early next maybe, but I think this week.
Heard it here.
Wish you the best. Thank you so much for joining us. Always a pleasure.
Thank you. Good to see you guys.
Thanks, Bhaji.
See you again soon.
Alrighty, guys. Another bullish one. I mean.
We're going to keep it rolling.
Practical, pragmatic thinking.
Again.
Token equity side.
Just creative too, man. It just feels so cool to be doing things different again. We're converting a token equity labs token split into an equity. Going through the protocols that we built in order to do that, this was something that we would have never seen during the apathetic market conditions.
100%.
Certainly not apathetic market conditions on our next guest's application.
That's for sure not.
It's good to see you, Say.
Good to see you, Say.
I think you joined my co-host Andy here in our studio in the Empire State.
Yeah, we did.
ETH I remember correctly. I wasn't there for that one.
That was before Robinhood changed, Say.
That was before a lot of.
A lot of stuff has changed, man. What is the last I mean, it must have been six, eight weeks ago. What is the last couple of months been like?
Man, it has been insane. It has been a tremendous growth period for us. We have had the fortune of just continuing to grow through many different occurrences, many different chain launches, and Arc included. And it is a blessing. We get to bring crypto and hopefully other assets to the real world and a bunch of consumers. And yeah, very fortunate to be in this situation.
One of the things that we have been talking about is that the market conditions are different, sure, but also the energy is different. And the way that we put that, people call it animal spirits. They call it a lot of things. We are saying we are having fun again. This is no longer apathy. We are having fun on-chain again. Fomo is a big part of that. What does it mean to bring fun back to the trenches?
It's an incredible privilege, right? Because as a trader myself, it's something where in the bear markets, there's really nothing to do. I think our thought was there's always a bull market somewhere. We get the opportunity to bring that to people. I think markets are picking up now, so it's even more fun. Winning is fun, right? I think when people make money, when they find good positions, when they find good narratives, it's something that's joyful not for them, but for everybody else on the platform as well. I think it's amazing. Hopefully, we can keep the uptrend going.
Yeah, man. I mean, look, we have seen now eight-figure unrealized P&Ls from the likes of Dumb Crayon Eater as well as Quartzi, as well as Point Farm Cap. I mean, these guys are out there with massive positions in ponds, massive positions in other assets. Social trading as a concept, the awareness of the concept has drastically increased. I guess the question here is, what next? I think we're in the beginning phase of this bull market. My take is that this just gets even crazier and bigger. I'm sure you probably somewhat agree, but it feels like the concept has been validated by the market, right? What's next for Fomo? What's next for you? How do you take this to the next level?
Yeah. I mean, since day one, our goal has been to try to become the social graph of finance, right? That means that we need to be dominant in every asset category: on-chain, majors, perps, prediction markets, stocks, RWAs, yield, anything that really occurs. For us, it's going to be, how do we take the next step? How do we take the jump from whatever assets are available today to slightly more mature assets and to other asset classes broadly? That's something that's incredibly exciting. I think it's kind of like the trillion-dollar question of, do you get to this place where you can actually translate this social graph to others, whether it's different asset classes or different consumers? Really excited about it, honestly. I think in the next 6-12 months, we'll see a lot more tokenized equity volume come on-chain.
I think you'll start to see stock volume start to materially become a bigger percentage of just on-chain market volume. I think that's just the start of hopefully a very long and fruitful transition to what is going to be on-chain for everything.
Yeah, man. I mean, I see the vision. I mean, it starts with memes. It starts with meme pets to stocks. Then all of a sudden, you are now live on Arc chain. They are going to have a whole swath of tokenized equities. Obviously, Robinhood Chain does as well. It is just so funny, like scrolling down people's Fomo profiles and seeing swaths of meme coins. You scroll down to like the dust, tokenized AMC, tokenized NVIDIA. You are like, wow, this could really be something a lot bigger than just a trading platform for crypto assets. It may have caught people by surprise to launch on Arc. Arc is known by the Circle Foundation. It is an institutional dominated brand. It is very professional vibe. But with that, as proven by Robinhood, there also comes a lot of opportunity. What is your take on the Arc launch?
What is unique for Fomo here? Why launch here?
Yeah. I mean, for us, we are constantly evaluating what are the most exciting chains that are to launch and what are the things that users are going to be excited to trade on, to use, to experience. I think it was very evident for us very early on that Arc was one of those chains, right, where there is fatigue in the markets a little bit this week with some of the on-chain assets going up and down and seeing some of the momentum go out the window a little bit. But I think all in all, new things are good. Competition is great. I think that Arc has a really good team that really wants to capitalize on its chain, right? I think that comes in a lot of different form factors. I think you try a lot of different things.
I am personally excited to see what AI and the AI narrative might look like on a chain that is institutionally focused.
It does feel like Arc has defined itself as one of the leaders in AI, commerce, agentic economy, as AI and crypto intersect. The question that I have, I am not a hater, just for what it is worth.
No worries.
I am curious.
They can handle the haters.
It's really just one word. I'm curious how you think about churn. Because I feel like you've probably thought a lot about this. It feels like this is something very relevant. I can tell by the way that you've gone and approached this industry, you're building for the long term. But churn is a very serious thing as it pertains to these users. How do you think about this and maintain user longevity?
Yeah. I think there's a number of things that are very important to us. I think churn is part of this conversation, but education, diversification of asset classes, experience with users teaching others with the social graph. I think that the exciting thing for us is we have about 2.5 million lifetime users. Today, we might see 600,000 of them today on the app. In any given month, we're seeing about 75% of users roughly visit the app on a monthly basis, right? So what that means is the opportunity to reactivate, to re-engage, to learn, to come back stronger. One of the core principles that is important for people out there to know is we don't own any of the layers. We don't own the launchpad. We don't own the AMM.
We don't own any of the vehicles that actually contribute to getting money with more volume or more user losses. So if you think about it that way, our best incentive here is actually for you to have longevity as a user, for you to come back, try different products, and ultimately mature into what we think could be very valuable users to the social graph itself.
Why is that a feature and not a bug?
I think that is a feature because it fundamentally aligns incentives here, where for us, we are thinking, how do you make sure that the longevity of the user is something that you can see through not just like their first day trading memes or trading asset classes, but how do you get them to look upstream? How do you start trading tokenized equities? How do you start thinking about yield? How do you start thinking about whatever it is is interesting to you as a financial speculation instrument? I think that that is something that not a lot of people are trying to break into. Everybody has decided, there is this one thing that I am very good at. This is the one thing that makes me money. So I am going to stay here because I am scared to lose my footing.
I think for us, if we fail to make this jump, it is not something that is sustainable for the industry, and it is not something that is interesting to us.
Yeah. I guess on this note of kind of like turning the app from a place, from like a brand perspective, from a user perspective, from like a lottery ticket into a portfolio, right? So when I have onboarded friends, and what keeps bringing me back to Fomo is the referrals. I just keep onboarding friends, and they use it. A cut of trading fees. It is kind of, you know, it is very basic stuff here, but it is what kind of works. I am trying to get them to not think about what runner they can get today or what trade they can hit today that is going to 10X their portfolio, but that it is a multi-week, multi-month, years-long game. That is a transition for a lot of people that is hard to rationalize with when you are used to sports gambling or effectively thinking about these things like lottery tickets.
How can you position your messaging, your personal brand, your entire ecosystem around longevity versus these kind of quick hits?
I think we do that by enabling people who are, let's say, the top traders or the top educators to be able to share more of their opinions, to go back and forth, to engage in a two-way conversation, right? Right now, the only way you can engage with somebody is you write a thesis, and other people can view your thesis. They can like your thesis. They can share it. But there's no meaningful discourse happening, right? What is the next step there? Well, you need to allow them to have conversations, right? I am a new user and I see UniPCS is up $10 million and hasn't sold a single dollar, I want to know why, right? I want to understand what is the thing you are so bullish on? What is the outcome you are expecting? And I would love a response and to just like learn by doing.
Because I think one of the fundamental misconceptions about trading and investing is that people think I need to go read six books. I need to go read Warren Buffett's newsletter. I need to go figure out what Howard Marks has said is the most important thing. And that's all the wrong way to think about it. Because if you are trying to learn how to do something, let's say basketball, you don't go watch LeBron James tapes and listen to books on how to take a jump shot. You go and do the thing. And you are going to be really bad. It's going to be really ugly. It's going to be very painful. But at the end of the day, you are going to be so much further ahead than anybody else who is doing the other thing, which is like not actioning.
Yeah. Talk to us about that reactivation journey. Because I am sure people are taking their lumps, especially if they are investing or trading on Fomo for the first time, right? Maybe they do get churn, but you made a really good point earlier.
I am blown out on a couple of coins.
Which is the reactivation journey. You have the opportunity, even after it is ugly and it is painful, to come back. Tell us how the psychology of a user may adapt as they try the platform, not once, not twice, but a third time, and ultimately stick.
Yeah. I think there is a lot of analogies here, but like you get on a bicycle, you fall, you get up. You get on a bicycle, you fall. Maybe you do not try for three months. You come back. You see it from a very different perspective. I think, honestly, with investing, with trading, with just about anything that has upside or downside, you need to be somewhat lucky, right? You need to have favorable tailwinds. You need to have the right people around you. I think that our job is to make sure that we can control the things we can control. How do we educate you more? How do we give you more tooling? How do we make you communicate better with other people?
How do we create a social graph that is tailored for you and your interests and not all of this other stuff that might not be pertinent to you? One of the cool things is we have now been live for about a year and a half, and we are starting to see our retention graph smile. That is a funny term because you literally start to see it come back up this way, where month four, month five, month six goes down, goes down, goes down, but month seven, month eight, month nine. A lot of that is market tailwind dependent. We have learned a lot of lessons from Robinhood, Coinbase, a lot of these really big trading apps where you can do everything in the world to try to retain users, but really the best thing to do is build a better product.
When they come back, they are ready, and they can actually utilize it better.
Yeah, man. I mean, you guys, and I know that you hear this all the time, are one of the best teams at receiving product feedback and implementing. I am going to keep pushing for NFTs. I think Fomo listing NFTs would quite literally bring the NFT bull market back, especially given where I think we are in the bull cycle. I will leave that to your engineering team and to your product team and to you, the CEO. Man, I got to ask, man. We are early to this app. It is a year and a half in. People are trading millions of dollars on this thing.
There has been no crypto app that has been super successful outside of a handful of wallets that have not launched a token for a variety of reasons, whether it be you guys are making a ton of money, buybacks, whether it be the team wants to hit an exit, if you will, but still do things the right way. There is a lot of incentives. You have venture capitalists, but obviously not the traditional crypto venture capitalists who might be expecting an early token or an early exit. I get the feeling you are in this game to win. I know that you are not thinking about this in a 2 or 3-year game. I get the feeling that you are not exactly looking for 100K under your mattress, right? You have done well on-chain. You have traded. But just what can you tell us here?
I mean, what can you tell us about the future plans of Fomo and the community and how you think about rewarding these adopters who have contributed to your bottom line day in and day out?
Yeah. I think the best way to think about this is like, how do you do this at a micro level as opposed to a macro level, right? I think everybody thinks about big grand prize at the end, airdrop, this, you know, I want to make six, seven, eight figures. But really, like everything that we do in our product is meant to incentivize and reward the people who provide value to the social graph. So we launched Creator Awards about a month ago. In one month, maybe not even a month, in 3 weeks, we have done about $11 million in payouts, right? That is on top of another $6 million in referrals.
We're trying to give away money to people who are providing value by onboarding people, by writing educational content, by discovering things early, by doing all these things that we think contribute to a very healthy social graph behavior. It's very easy to think, all right, what is the really big prize at the end? I actually think like the very small prizes along the journey is going to be the thing that actually keeps people very happy, secure, flow, and really willing to contribute to what we think is a very active and cultivating and growing social graph.
I can't lie and say I go in the app every day and I get my payout on the referral and I just keep allocating to a single token that's not going to be named because it's a professional show here today. I just love it. I just come on every single day and I'm like, oh, thanks, Say. Thanks, Say.
Tell us what it takes to build a social graph. What are some of the things that you've taken inspiration from? Because I take it, you know, people launch a chain or a crypto app and they look at other successful crypto apps or other successful blockchains. You launch a social graph, you look at some of the most successful and prolific social networks out there, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp. Are those the kinds of applications that you take inspiration from, or is there some other industry segment that you're learning from?
I think all of the previous giants, both successful and failed social media platforms, have paved the way for how we think about social. I think my biggest or our biggest way to grab inspiration is from like who is the one that has done it through multiple eras? Facebook is the prime example of that, where they went from social graph invention, right, of like you connect to people you know, it's about the person, it's about your relationship. They also dominated the next era of Instagram, which is the interest graph era, which is it's no longer about is this person your friend, but it's more about what is the content. Now the thing precedes the person. That was an incredible shift in social media one to social media two.
Social media 3 in our minds is going to be the very next thing, which is in a world of AI commoditization, content is easy. It is very easy to go viral. It is very easy to build a following by doing things that are related to generation of content or media. So what is real? Well, risk is real. Speculation is real. One of the interesting conversations I had recently was like, you think about social media psychology, a lot of it is feedback loops, right? Dopamine feedback loops of I put out a tweet, I get likes, I learn that it is good, I do it again. Same with photos, right? But the core difference with Fomo and any of these platforms is on Twitter, if I go post a banger tweet, I have to try to guess.
It is very subjective of why this went viral or why it is good. On Fomo, you go viral because you made a lot of money. That is objective. Market cap goes up. You make money. You do not sell, it goes up. It makes you make money. I think having the first ever objective feedback loop ever in social media is very, very powerful.
Yeah, I like that.
Facebook is honestly the inspiration for all the social media platforms that have ever existed.
Say's going to ask one thing on that note, Robin, then we'll let you fire away. What we saw the last month and a half, Say, was a lot of these big traders that have large X accounts, whether anon or not, run up an unrealized P&L to the moon, right? Then I saw a Razor tweet who's, I think, affiliated with you guys or a partner, great show. He's hilarious. He's like, damn, like I should have sold. Like I was up so much. I had my rules. Flood always told me, always be selling, always be selling. Because I think he was like, you know, it was public, I didn't really know what to do. I didn't want to dump it. I didn't know how.
What is the ramifications of the public nature of being up a gazillion and being like, I don't want to sell because I don't want to be seen as like, you know, the, you know, weak hands or I don't want to dump on people? What are the ramifications of being up a ton and being public in your mind?
I think there's a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. The right way is you follow your own book, you follow your own rules, and you do it in a way where people are not hurt by your actions, right? I think that this is something that is going to be widely criticized by a lot of people, maybe. I like to think of this as like when you're doing something right and you're doing it at the highest level, you have both good and bad. So think about LeBron James, right? He has haters. He has fans. But the haters are the loudest, right? The people that are going to give you the most issues are the ones who are coming at it from a negative angle because it's better engagement.
I think that as we transcend this trading echo chamber of just people on CT or people in small groups to like the world, there's going to be more and more opinions. There's always going to be somebody out there that thinks you did the wrong thing, right, wrong, profit, loss, no matter what. So a lot of this is like, you know, when you become a celebrity for the first time or an athlete for the first time, you have an understanding of how do I do things the right way? How do I portray myself? How do I do things in a way that doesn't take every opinion into account, but just the ones that matter? I want to say the same thing for the top traders, where you're going to have haters.
You could do everything by the book, and people will still dislike things that you do. Do it in a way that's grateful, that preserves your reputation, and that ultimately helps others.
I love it, Say. Thanks for your time, man. I think we're about wrapped here, Rob.
I got one last one. It's so funny how, based on your response, Andy and I go two completely diverse directions.
That's always the case.
I was going to ask because, you know, on Arc, this is sort of the agentic chain as it seems like it's coming to be. I take it you're going to have this agentic flavor of Fomo on Arc. You sort of answered my question already. I was going to ask you, what is different about building a social graph for agents? I take it there is no difference. You already defined the prerequisite for what it takes to go viral on Fomo. It takes making money. It's objective. As long as your agent is going and making money, the same thing that goes viral on Fomo socially with humans is the same thing that goes virally among agents.
Yeah, that's crazy.
100%. I think that at the end of the day, the P&L and the risk-reward is one of the most objective metrics you can have. Whether you are 20, whether you're 50, 80, whether you're 1,000 or an agent or whatever it is, I think that this is an objective metric that will stand true in this new graph that we want to call like the speculation graph era. I'm quite excited to see how things advance from here.
Say, thanks so much, man.
Say, thanks, buddy. Best of luck, man. Cheers. Yeah, man.
See you again soon.
That guy's awesome. I mean, Fomo is so cool, man. I just, look, guys, I'm honestly like, do not copy trade me on Fomo. I simply just continue to use my ref fees to accumulate a single token. I will just continue to do that. I'll just continue to do that. We got Jack Anorak of Aerodrome in the house. He is the president and co-contributor of Aerodrome. Jack, pleasure to see you in the flesh, man. Happy Arc Day. How are you doing today, man?
Doing great. It's been kind of a wild day. Really good speeches. Feeling pretty motivated, not just about Arc, but I think about what we can do as an industry.
I know, right? The mental tides have turned. We've done, I mean, probably 15 interviews today, maybe 18. Still bringing the energy for you, Jack. I'll tell you, there's just this bullish undertone about where we're at, about the state of affairs, about what's possible. People are starting to believe again, to dream a little bit again. What does that mean for your business? What does this kind of bullish undertone mean for these feedback loops that you guys can get on your product? Just give us a bit of your perspective.
I feel like when we talk about bullishness and we talk about believing again, there's always a story, right? There's a story we tell ourselves, like finally, this is going to be the product that changes everything for us. This is going to be the kind of user that's going to come in and deploy everything that they have because this is obviously the best place for them. I think for me, it really comes with a lot of responsibility because we've seen a lot of this stuff before. Every time people are bullish in the last year or so, there's a story that has some glimmer of something legitimate.
I think as a builder, it becomes very important to say, okay, now that we know that there's this new infrastructure that's come online, or all of a sudden chains are faster and now we can settle these trades in ways that are a lot more similar to what you can get in TradFi, the differences between what we have today and where we need to be become that much more important to overcome. I think right now, tokenization is the big word. Stocks are the big word. RWAs are a big acronym. I think what we see is there are use cases that are starting to come up. Some of them are extremely legitimate. I think all of them kind of show the possibility of something to build towards. With Arc in particular, I think there's a lot of discussion on foreign exchange.
For us, I think we have to figure out how to bridge the gap between we are an on-chain automated market maker that settles trades and we are competing against, not against other players on chain, but against Interactive Brokers, large broker dealers. How do we make sure that the products that we're delivering are better than what exists outside? That's my response. Every dream brings with it a need to actually deliver. I think that's where we're at right now.
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, we are delivering. Aerodrome is delivering. The industry is delivering in terms of the legitimization, the tokenization of assets. But of course, Jack, we are, I mean, we are not even a tenth of a single percent on the way of tokenizing assets, right? Let's talk Aerodrome on Arc. You guys have had a successful launch in terms of your tokenized assets and equities products as of late. This is now becoming a dominant form of yield for LPs on Aerodrome with some skyrocketing high APR, similar to DeFi Summer, as well as just this general trend. Talk to us about this Arc launch. What is this opportunity for Aerodrome to be the liquidity layer here? What does this mean broadly for your product stack? How does this help your bottom line?
I think as we are starting to go across chain, I think we are really starting to think more deeply about what is the product stack that is being offered, right? So we have Arrowlight. That is the thing that is being deployed. It enables people to seamlessly use FX as a foundational layer supporting all of the other app building that is happening, right? So if people want to be able to borrow or lend, they want to be able to settle remittances, other sorts of real-world activities that are moving on chain. People need to know that there is a good price. People need to know that there is inventory that they can draw on to be able to satisfy foreign exchange. I think that is the work that we are generally doing right now.
Got it.
Arrowlight that you are deploying on Arc, it sounds like this deployment is fundamentally about FX. I realize that FX is a very core part of the Arc launch, yet we really have not had.
We haven't heard about it.
We haven't heard.
Honestly, you just don't hear about it on chain really much at all yet.
Mostly because USDC and US dollar denominated stablecoins dominate the stablecoin market. Just talk to us about what you think the evolution of foreign exchange, like what is the market structure as it exists right now? How do you see this developing over the coming weeks and months, particularly on Arc?
It's a funny thing, right? Because we talk about stablecoins being just up into the right chart. It's one of the things that we always kind of hone in on as an indication that people are kind of onboarding. FX is really weird because it's kind of very different from a lot of crypto. Most of crypto or most of the industry has to do with speculation, has to do with kind of broad price discovery. Can this thing go to a million in a day? FX is a very different sort of thing. You don't enter FX really to speculate. You don't really even enter into FX to do real-world activities. Most of it, you are entering into that market because you have to enter into that market. It is incredibly unique. It's not speculation-driven, but it is fundamental.
It is some of the highest volume asset type that exists anywhere. It is one that can be live today in a way that a lot of other RWAs are not. There's a lot of, I think, DeFi building that has to happen to really start to complete the offering to make people kind of bridge over. That's kind of what we're in the business of doing is we're trying to figure out, again, we have a couple of these tools around the industry that allow us to do like XYZ like 50% of the way, and we have to be like 120% of the way with all this stuff. FX is interesting because I think we can build it. I think the asset type is ready to be there.
It's just, but as you said, it's not going to be the kind of thing that is incredibly sexy until it is the kind of asset class that just overwhelms everything else in terms of volume.
Right. I mean, it's trillions, man.
Right.
We're talking like volumes of transactions and nominal sizes bigger than anything else on chain.
So there's massive flows, which is why I think everyone really understands the opportunity at stake. But the disconnect maybe just, it just feels like there is not non-USD stable. How do you execute a robust FX ecosystem? Do we have sufficient non-dollar stablecoins on chain right now? Or is that a missing piece before foreign exchange can really be flushed out on chain?
That's a great question. I think, I mean, there are a couple of things. I mean, ultimately, the whole thing depends on good quality stablecoins, right? I think we're still as an industry trying to figure out which are the best stablecoins for each individual currency that exists, right? They're kind of like euro dollars. They're very kind of specific to whatever bank is custodying them. Every team shows up and says, hey, we have a new coin. It's going to represent this thing. But it's very tough to make sure that what you have is actually going to be the kinds of things that market participants, market makers, other sorts of people are going to be taking the risk on, right? You're already so far off the risk curve being like, I'm going to trade the Turkish lira.
Then you're asking me to gamble on the third best Turkish lira stablecoin without any real access to bankering or anything like that. We have to figure that stuff out. I think once we get there, that's like step half of one. So there's a lot of work to be done, but the pot is huge.
When you think about this Arc launch, I mean, you guys are active on Base, Ethereum, right? There is a lot happening, or at least the launch. We do not need to get into it all, but Arc is here live. Arrowlight, Jack, talk to me about expectations, North Stars, metrics. Is this the same as other implementations? Is it a different roadmap? Is it a different North Star? What are you looking at here?
I mean, the mental model is actually similar to Bridge USDC versus native, where the idea is you send out Arrowlight to places where this worked out really well for us, right? Because V3, our big Arrow launch, is going to be forthcoming. We wanted to be here day one for this. Arrowlight, which we have just developed, is a perfect application for this thing, which is it does all basic functions. You can do all the stuff that you can with a DEX. It is a zero fee system so that anybody can build on top of it. It allows us to start experimenting deeply with the sorts of products that we think are going to be interesting and important for individual chains. There is not much else to be said about it. I think the idea is we are here.
We can build all the stuff. We have the ability to incentivize. It is just that once we do the full deployment, which will be forthcoming, that is when everything starts to, the real Arrow flywheel starts to kick in.
Without getting into a specific date, what can people expect once that does kick in? Because now you have some semblance of a multi-chain deployment, right? We have Base, and now we have Arc. What does it look like once Arrow is deployed on Ethereum Mainnet? How do we start to see these pieces fit together to really build a comprehensive ecosystem?
I think what happens is every single ecosystem that has a particular claim to expanding the pie is going to have the best tools at its disposal to do so. By uniting all the chains and aligning along certain verticals and integrating everything into the Arc ecosystem, what we're doing is we're realizing the idea that you have this DEX trading infrastructure that allows participants to get the max value out of whatever it is they're doing. In this case, it is to trade, to host, to get liquid, to get yield, to build new products, and to do whatever it is on these ecosystems to do best. If Arc is going to be going crazy on FX, it's going to be able to facilitate that.
ETH there's another chain that wants to use FX as some sort of adjunct to whatever product it wants to focus on, right? It will be able to tap into those pools. That's the cross-chain reality I think we've all believed in as an industry. This is going to be the first kind of honest-to-God realization of that sort of vision.
I love it. Just last thing from me, Jack, on the Arc side of things again here. Obviously, this is the Mainnet day. Just kind of more broadly, you've been around the block, right? You've seen a lot of this happen, launches, etc. What feels different about Arc? I'm not trying to ask you to glaze them, right? But genuinely, what is different about this launch to you, if anything?
I think, all right, so my vaguely hot take of the moment is, and I just came to this realization a couple of days ago, is I think tech is starting to matter again.
We love that take. That's an interesting take. I love it.
We were like, oh, we've got all the tech already. We just need distribution. We need the institutions, whatever.
We were like, this is fintech, but we've transitioned away from technology more into finance and regulation. I love this.
No, because that's the whole thing, right? I think for the last couple of years, we've said, okay, distribution is the thing, or regulatory access is the thing, or we've got the best consortium behind us. The thing is, we're getting so good at trading, we're getting so close to how trading happens in real life that you start actually kind of knife fighting for inches in terms of performance. I'm not talking about this chain versus that chain. I'm talking about this chain versus what's required to actually onboard whatever new products and users and whatever. When I think about Arc in particular, to bring back to the question, I'm thinking, okay, so they've got sub-second finality. Great. Lowers the cost of capital. I'm thinking the ability to kind of embed confidentiality. That's great.
Half of the people in this room are people who have been begging for some sort of way to kind of obscure their positions in trade.
Sure. 100%.
When I think about the chain that is going to actually kind of onboard everybody, and again, by the way, onboard everybody and also agents, that is also significant. You need as low cost as possible. You need to understand what your business model is as a chain. So you are not competing with your users. You are actually being fairly economically neutral, which I think Arc is, for what it is worth. That is when you start to do good for, again, not just yourself, but the entire industry. Because if Arc somehow grows, I just land on the table. Arc somehow grows, its users to infinity, you can bet a lot of the other chains that focus on other areas or even related areas are going to benefit from it. That is the whole end game here.
I want to make sure that people recognize that this is still a very collaborative effort. I will close with this. One single asset class, right? Some sort of wacky thing, like a $100 billion asset class. Jeremy Allaire had a thing up there. Total tokenized deposits were like $47 billion or something like that. ETH you got like 5% to 10%, 20% of just a single asset class on chain, it would flip the tables on the.
Of the entire stablecoin market cap or of the entire, right? I mean, we are like a couple big banks deciding that they are going to issue their, whatever it is, their bills on chain this month, like three of them, from flipping the entire market cap of the world's largest stablecoin. Or the entirety of RWAs. I mean, we are literally on the precipice of the floodgates in a couple button clicks from changing the entire reality of where we go. And there is a whole episode of how do you invest in that trend? And there is a whole episode about how do you not invest in that trend? And there is a lot of conversations to be had, Jack Anorak, but it has been eight hours for the block today. And I am losing my voice. I really, really appreciate your time, Jack.
Thanks for this call.
I really love what Aerodrome has done. Congrats on the launch on Arc. And best of luck through the full launch. And thanks for coming on.
Yeah, excited.
It's a pleasure.
See you again soon. Thanks, Jack.
Alrighty.
I mean, nonstop bullishness today, Rob. I mean, has it ever been more bullish?
Has it ever been more bullish?
I mean, it has been more bullish in the past, but I mean.
Maybe it has been more euphoric. I do not know if it has been more bullish.
People say pre-wealthy or pre-rich or we are pre-bull, whatever you want to say. We are not only in the pre-bull or in the pre-whatever from a monetary lens. We are quite literally in the beginning of the adoption curve of this industry that Rob and I joined 10 years ago. It is 2017. We started this show six years ago. We have been waiting for this moment for so, so long, like beyond what you guys can understand how long we have been waiting for this moment, Rob. What does this mean to you?
Well, I mean, sometimes this moment comes and it catches you offside. Let's not.
It's certainly not catching us offside.
That's exactly where I was going. It doesn't feel like it's catching us offside.
We are deeply positioned in this market. I would hate to log into this industry every day and not be positioned and bullish. With that being said, markets are volatile. Stay smart, stay safe, stay educated. Guys, we have been waiting for this moment. I mean, talking to Jeremy, let's take it all the way back to the top with Merlin and Jeremy. I mean, we had a hell of a day here.
I mean, honestly, Jeremy was one of my favorite conversations of the entire day.
Oh, I mean, by far.
The reason being the visionary that Jeremy is.
Yes.
Because he describes not just a crypto thing and not just a finance thing and not just a technology thing. He weaves these threads together and paints a picture of the future. We had a brand consultant on the roll-up that kind of talked a lot about this. He pointed out a moment in the movie Ratatouille around a critic and talking about why it is important to be bullish on the future.
Yes, to be optimist.
To be optimistic.
Optimists will continue to win.
Be bullish on the future and be a tastemaker and a curator. That is really the role that I see Jeremy Allaire playing and Circle and Arc playing in the intelligent economy and in the intelligence revolution more broadly. Jeremy Allaire is a technologist at heart. We have had multiple people here, including us, say that technology matters again. This is a world of fintech, which is fundamentally made up of finance and technology. For so long, we spent so much time and energy on the technology, but we strayed far from our roots as we broached into the institutional wave, into the regulatory upgrade, and ultimately into finance. Now the institutions are FOMOing into our world of fintech.
It feels like the roll-up has also fulfilled on a mission that we had early days to be the shelling point of the intelligent economy, be the shelling point for knowledge, to be this catalyst and this place. I mean, what is the roll-up?
Yes. I mean, it is just a community of shared open public knowledge. We will continue to do that. Just to kind of pull you out of the weeds there on Jeremy Allaire and on Arc, this launch marks the beginning of a new chapter for Circle.
I think so.
For Arc, we had a packed-out arena here, a packed-out venue. It was totally filled to the brim buzzing. It still is. I see espresso martinis. I see smiles. I see laughs. People are having fun. People are optimistic. People are feeling like you are still early again because knock, we are still early, Rob. I know this sounds like delusional bullishness coming from the roll-up here. It is about time to close out. I just want to express our gratitude to the Arc team, to the Circle team.
It feels like the roll-up launched on Arc today.
To Jeremy, to Peters, to all the comms people that have helped make this happen, to the roll-up production team all day working their asses off to make this possible.
Thank you so much.
Very, very grateful for everybody behind the scenes making this possible. We have been working very hard to be continuing our coverage and stay on top of things. The rumor mill is buzzing. The portfolios are up. People are optimistic. We are here to be your source of truth, of companionship, and to continue to help you guys dominate this bull market and your financial future as well as your investing and your entrepreneurship or career in general. That is all that I have to say. Thank you so much, Arc. Thank you so much, Circle. Thank you to the production team behind the backstage. They are absolutely amazing. We are signing off from Arc Mainnet. Bring it in, buddy. Let's go.
Let's love. See you guys on the next.