Circle co-founder, chairman and CEO Jeremy Allaire used a Q2 2026 earnings AMA on Aug. 19, 2026 to answer 11 investor questions covering Circle’s execution, stablecoin use cases, USDC’s global payments opportunity, the company’s long-term business model, Arc’s five-year outlook, trust in the AI agent economy, CPN, EURC and the effect of the CLARITY Act on USDC growth.
Allaire says Circle’s post-IPO pace has accelerated
Opening the session, Allaire said Circle had just released its Q2 results and wanted to widen the discussion by giving a broader group of followers the chance to ask questions.
Asked why he is confident in the team’s ability to execute as Circle expands across payments, Arc, capital markets and financial infrastructure, Allaire said the company is executing very well. Since the IPO, he said, product velocity has been high and the speed at which Circle has brought new products and capabilities to market has been striking.
He tied that to a cross-functional operating model built over many years. Circle is shipping financial infrastructure, regulated financial products and platform infrastructure at the same time, which requires sustained coordination across teams. He added that headcount growth has been deliberate rather than explosive. Circle, he said, has tried to build “institutional depth,” and many leaders across key functions have been with the company for a long time, giving it strong organizational cohesion.
Allaire also said Circle has begun using AI and agent infrastructure deeply, starting with software engineering and then spreading across the company. He told employees this could be one of the most important opportunities of their careers because AI acts as a force multiplier, even a kind of new superpower. The people who benefit most, he said, will be those who can work across disciplines and coordinate both humans and AI agents.
He still flagged two areas where Circle needs to strengthen. One is cyber risk, which he said is evolving quickly across crypto, technology and finance. The other is global operations. Circle first built its core markets and then expanded into major financial centers, but now sees strong demand across dozens of emerging markets and other countries, creating the need for stronger local staffing, operations and infrastructure.
Stablecoins already have clear product-market fit in several sectors
On which real financial problem stablecoins are closest to solving at scale, Allaire described stablecoins as a general-purpose digital money architecture with a wide range of applications.
At one end, he said, AI agents can pay fractions of a cent to other AI agents for reasoning, data processing and other forms of cognitive labor, transactions that the traditional financial system could not support. At the other end, large capital markets institutions are using stablecoins and USDC as working capital and collateral, and as part of the infrastructure for traditional derivatives markets. Large multinational companies are also starting to use Circle products and stablecoins for global treasury management and internal fund transfers.
He said a few areas already show strong product-market fit. The first is the digital asset market, where stablecoins function as a reliable digital dollar available globally around the clock. In that market, they already serve as working capital, collateral, cash, settlement and payments.
The second is digital dollar savings in emerging markets. Allaire said demand for digital dollars such as USDC is rising across many parts of the world. For small and medium-sized businesses, households and even some larger companies, stablecoins are starting to act like a near “$1 bank account substitute,” supporting commerce, savings, investment and cross-border payments.
The third is cross-border settlement and international payments. Stablecoins can serve as the settlement leg of a cross-border transaction, and in more cases the stablecoin itself is also the money the recipient ends up holding. He said USDC can be used for paying, receiving, storing value and moving money across borders, and that Circle is already seeing this inside CPN.
Allaire added that many cross-border payments firms, fintechs and banks are working with Circle to plug USDC into their settlement capabilities. He also named Visa and Mastercard as major payment networks adopting stablecoins for cross-border settlement.
Beyond those areas, he said the agentic economy could become a very large category because stablecoins, programmable money and machine-mediated financial infrastructure fit naturally with AI agents. He also expects stablecoins to move deeper into traditional financial markets as convergence between TradFi and onchain finance continues.
Merchant payments are part of the long-term picture as well. Allaire said stablecoins can improve merchant unit economics and create new consumer value through rewards and membership-style benefits, though he added that this market is still some distance from true mass adoption.
USDC’s payments opportunity spans settlement, capital markets and AI agents
When asked where USDC’s biggest opportunity in global payments lies, Allaire pointed to cross-border settlement, capital markets payments and settlement, and agentic payments.
On AI agents, he said agents live in the cloud and on the internet, and their task execution is highly deterministic. Circle is already seeing that more than 99% of agent payments on protocols such as x402 are being made in USDC. According to Allaire, agents need reliable money, a widely accepted unit of account, fast settlement, very low cost and deterministic execution. He said USDC fits those needs well.
He also highlighted retail payments. One model growing quickly, he said, is the “stablecoin card.” A number of new neobank-style products are being built on stablecoins, allowing users to hold digital wallets and stablecoins, send and receive funds, deploy stablecoins into DeFi, invest in digital assets and real-world assets, and spend stablecoin balances through traditional card networks at merchants. Circle, he said, works with nearly all of the major companies in that segment and is seeing strong growth.
Point-of-sale payments could shift too. In many markets across Asia and Latin America, QR codes have already become a major payment rail. Allaire said the move from holding stablecoins in a mobile wallet to settling stablecoin payments directly to merchants through QR codes no longer seems far away.
He argued that such a transition may not require traditional card terminals. The world has already shown that payment acceptance can be upgraded through QR codes alone, and instant settlement plus very low fees matter because they improve the economics of acceptance.
As stablecoins become legal electronic money in major markets, he said, merchant acceptance infrastructure should start to evolve faster, especially after the GENIUS Act takes effect in the US. More payment infrastructure companies, in his view, will start supporting stablecoin payments.
Reserve income remains important, but Circle is building beyond it
Asked whether Circle’s long-term economic engine will mainly be reserve income from USDC or transaction and infrastructure revenue built around USDC, Allaire said the market is still in a very early phase. The entire onchain stablecoin market, he said, is only about $300 billion today, while the onchain infrastructure needed to run this financial system has been developing for more than a decade and is only now reaching a maturity level institutions can truly adopt.
He said that if investors look at the total addressable market across electronic money and the functions built around it, including capital markets, payments, remittances and financial infrastructure, today’s market still appears small.
Allaire then reached for a technology analogy. He said onchain finance and stablecoins today are roughly where the internet was in 2002. By then, the internet had already gone through its first wave, with some strong products, many failures and a great deal of capital invested, yet the industry was still early. Even though 2002 sat near the internet bear market, the period that followed brought scale, maturity and broad social adoption across the web, software, digital media and communications.
He believes the internet financial system, stablecoins and onchain infrastructure are at a comparable stage now. That, in his view, means stablecoins can grow from the current hundreds of billions into the trillions. He said Circle believes stablecoins are a better and safer form of money and will therefore circulate widely over the long run.
To move from hundreds of billions to trillions, however, Circle needs global distribution and platform partners. Allaire said the company has to work with major financial firms, technology companies and fintechs, embed Circle infrastructure into their products, let those partners earn revenue and let them reward their own users as the ecosystem grows.
Within that model, reserve income will still be a powerful economic engine for Circle, he said, but more of that value will be shared across the ecosystem. Circle’s goal is not to maximize profit extraction from the business as it exists today. The goal is to build the ecosystem to a multi-trillion-dollar scale and make USDC broadly integrated into the global financial and economic system.
At the same time, Circle is building other products, services and platforms. Allaire specifically mentioned blockchain infrastructure transaction revenue and new partnership structures, then pointed to CPN and Arc as examples.
He described CPN as an onchain payment network that has only really been operating for about a year but is already showing strong growth. Circle believes it can eventually monetize CPN through transaction-based fees and by embedding additional value-added services into the network.
Arc, in his telling, is a new economic operating system. He called it an “economic cloud” and said Circle sees the opportunity as being on the scale of Amazon Web Services. As AI development accelerates and the number of applications rises, he said, Arc could become an important new source of revenue for the company.
Circle’s model, then, is to keep earning reserve income while expanding USDC’s scale and network effects, and at the same time extend upward into the application layer and downward into the infrastructure layer with more digital assets, protocols and platforms.
Arc’s five-year vision ties onchain systems to AI-driven economic activity
On where USDC and Arc could be in five years, Allaire said Circle has been thinking about infrastructure for internet-based economic activity for around 13 years.
When Circle was founded in 2013, he said, one basic idea was that blockchains would eventually become distributed computing networks. People would deploy code, in the form of smart contracts, to those networks, allowing software to participate directly in economic coordination. Any type of record and any type of asset, he said, could ultimately be issued onto those computing networks.
At the time that idea felt distant. After years of iteration, Allaire said, the industry is now entering a special period in which legal systems are preparing for the technology, the technology itself has reached what he called a fourth-generation capability phase, and governments, financial institutions and major technology companies are beginning to understand that this infrastructure will matter.
His argument goes beyond crypto trading or payments. He said blockchains are turning into operating systems, specifically distributed network operating systems built to run applications with economic properties.
He extended that logic to the structure of the firm itself. A company, he said, is fundamentally a set of contractual relationships: ownership structures, ownership-linked contracts, mechanisms for investment, mechanisms for paying investors cash flows and dividends, treasury management and the contracts needed to operate globally. In the future, he said, that whole structure can move onchain.
Allaire said the world will see onchain corporations that are increasingly coordinated by software, with that software increasingly created and executed by AI. His broader view is that operating systems for intelligence and operating systems for economic activity will begin to merge, and that the next five years will show that convergence more clearly.
As businesses become more onchain and more agentic, interactions, transactions, contracting and back-office systems should move into that environment. Circle wants to build Arc together with a wide range of participants around the world, including those who run, upgrade and govern the infrastructure, and those who can capture economic value from the infrastructure itself.
If more global economic activity moves into those systems, he said, the role of onchain money such as USDC will naturally expand. Under that scenario, USDC, EURC and other digital currencies would all have room for significant growth.
Trust in the AI agent economy starts with identity, reputation and policy controls
Asked what the most basic trust primitive will be before money moves between autonomous AI agents using USDC, Allaire said Circle has been spending a lot of time on that question.
He referenced a paper published the previous week called The Open Economy for Agents, which lays out what is required for a functioning agentic economic system and explains the capabilities Circle Agent Stack already provides as well as features the company plans to build during the rest of the year.
Allaire broke the issue into three pieces.
- First is Know Your Agent. Just as Circle must know its customers, he said, the system must be able to verify the identities of end users, businesses and the agents acting on their behalf. Regulated financial institutions already do this work. Circle wants similar cryptographic proofs, assertions, attestations and verifiable identity systems so that when one agent interacts with another, or with a business or user, the counterparties can know who that agent is and what permissions it has.
- Second is reputation. Allaire said reputation is difficult because online ratings can be manipulated, a problem already visible in marketplaces and listing systems. Circle is studying ways to build a more credible reputation loop based on actual use, transactions, settlements and interactions.
- Third is programmable policy. He said Circle has already started shipping products in this area. Circle Agent Wallet can already set spending policies, allowing users to control through software how much an agent can spend and who it can transact with. Circle plans to keep expanding those controls.
He said these are all core components of trust in the agent economy, and added that Circle is also involved in industry standard-setting work, including through the x402 Foundation.
Allaire on personal discipline and leading a long mission
One question turned to how Allaire personally maintains the energy and mental clarity needed for a long-term mission like Circle.
He said he realized about 10 years ago that if he wanted to take on a complex, long-duration mission and stay at his best, he needed to change some of the habits he had when he was younger. He described becoming very disciplined in several areas.
One is diet and physical health. Another is sleep, where he said he maintains a strict and stable routine and does a great deal to protect sleep quality. A third is mindfulness, which he said is also one of Circle’s core values. For him that includes more than meditation. It also includes how people face the world, how they listen and whether they can remain present with others.
He said that practice, shaped in part by Buddhist ideas, helps avoid catastrophic thinking. When facing challenges, he tries to stay calm, accept what is happening and solve problems step by step, day by day.
He also said he keeps up regular physical exercise across different types of activity. Those habits, he said, help him sustain energy and mental sharpness and allow him to stay more connected with his family and children.
CPN has more than 175 financial institutions onboarded
On whether Circle has a formal partner, referral, ecosystem or business development program to bring more companies into CPN, Allaire said it does.
He said the CPN page on Circle’s website includes an application path for becoming a CPN partner. In Circle’s latest earnings materials, the company said more than 175 financial institutions have joined CPN and connected to the network in different ways. The integration path depends on each company’s business type.
Circle is also making the network more extensible, he said, so that third parties can plug in value-added services such as trade finance. He added that Circle already has some examples involving credit facilities for cross-border settlement.
Allaire said Circle has a dedicated global business development team focused entirely on payments and CPN. He also pointed to the broader Circle Alliance Program, which already includes thousands of companies and offers participants additional benefits and opportunities to work more closely with Circle.
EURC has passed €400 million in circulation
Asked how EURC reached a circulation figure of 400 million so quickly and how Circle plans to sustain the momentum, Allaire first corrected the unit used in the question. EURC circulation has passed €400 million, not $400 million, he said.
He added that EURC is now one of the world’s largest digital euros. Even so, the euro stablecoin market remains small compared with dollar stablecoins worth hundreds of billions. The total market capitalization of all euro stablecoins, he said, is currently close to €1 billion.
Allaire attributed EURC’s early growth to several factors. One was timing. Circle committed from the beginning to launching a euro stablecoin within the European regulatory framework, worked with European regulators and financial institutions, and built the required infrastructure before MiCA took effect. As a result, EURC was ready to enter the market when the rules came online.
Another factor was distribution. USDC had already built broad distribution relationships across the ecosystem, which gave EURC an existing base from which to expand. He said many leading European exchanges support EURC, and users can mint and redeem it 1:1 across different platforms.
Circle is also working with leading DeFi protocols to build EURC markets, lending markets, swap activity and USDC/EURC foreign exchange tools.
As for what comes next, Allaire said both dollar stablecoins and euro stablecoins are still early, with the digital euro even earlier. He repeated one of his central views: onchain money is superior to current electronic money and legacy money systems. That, he said, should increase the importance of an onchain digital euro over time.
He expects demand for euro stablecoins to grow as MiCA develops further, later regulatory revisions arrive and Europe opens more capital market and real-world asset opportunities. He also said programmable euro stablecoins should find more use cases in programmable money and cross-border settlement, and suggested EURC could also find opportunities in emerging markets where businesses and households may want more currency diversification.
According to Allaire, Circle already has several initiatives underway to expand EURC’s role in Europe and globally.
Arc mainnet is set for Sept. 16 and is designed to hide blockchain complexity
Another question challenged whether Arc’s biggest advantage may be less about the agent economy itself and more about giving consumer-facing blockchain products an environment where crypto fades into the background. Allaire said he strongly agreed.
He confirmed that the Arc public mainnet is scheduled to launch on Sept. 16. Arc has roughly five core capabilities, he said, and AI-native and agentic applications are only one of them. What makes Arc attractive to AI agents also makes it friendlier to mainstream users.
Arc is a stablecoin-native chain, he said, and its gas and fee model use USDC. That means users of Arc-based applications do not need to buy a separate token first, or even understand what gas is. Transaction fees are very low, usually fractions of a cent, so developers can absorb them.
To explain the model, Allaire compared it to Netflix running on Amazon Web Services. Netflix customers do not receive a separate AWS line item on their bills. Yet many blockchain applications have effectively asked users to understand and pay for the underlying computing network directly. He called that an absurd user experience. People using an application should not need to care which computing network sits underneath it or what the underlying transaction and data infrastructure costs.
Arc is meant to make that layer disappear. Developers can absorb transaction costs the same way they already absorb AI inference costs, AWS costs or Google Cloud costs.
He said the model also helps enterprise developers, who usually do not want to hold various digital commodities just to run an application, then deal with complicated accounting, compliance and custody. If they can operate infrastructure by holding digital dollars instead, the finance, compliance and legal burden becomes much simpler.
That is why one of Arc’s main design goals is to make the underlying operating system invisible to users. People should simply use the application, whether it is financial, governance-related or agentic, and focus on the experience rather than the base technology.
Allaire said early adopters are willing to tolerate technical friction, but if blockchain is going to serve billions of people, the underlying technology must become close to invisible. In his words, Arc is one of the most important attempts the blockchain industry has made to create that kind of seamless user experience.
He added that Circle’s effort is aimed squarely at developers because a platform business ultimately lives or dies by the developers it attracts and what they can build. Circle is preparing a number of related products for the September mainnet launch, with a focus on helping developers create fast, safe and reliable user experiences.
USDC can still grow even without a September CLARITY Act vote
The final question asked whether USDC adoption would keep rising even if the CLARITY Act does not pass in September. Allaire’s short answer was yes.
He said stablecoins are becoming part of the legal financial system around the world. In many jurisdictions, stablecoin legislation is moving faster than broader digital asset market structure legislation. He cited Japan, Europe and the US, where the GENIUS Act has already passed.
That law will take effect in January next year and will make digital dollars such as USDC an official part of the US financial system and the dollar financial system, he said. Allaire called that a major step that should keep driving demand, growth and activity.
He still described the CLARITY Act as important because the industry wants clear rules for trading markets, derivatives markets, tokenization and capital markets, along with registration and regulatory structures in those areas. In his view, that matters for consumer protection, market competitiveness and US competitiveness.
Even so, he said stablecoin growth does not depend on the CLARITY Act. The two have synergies, but stablecoin adoption has its own independent growth logic.
Allaire also warned against focusing too narrowly on the US. American policy matters and has global influence, he said, but digital assets and digital money are inherently global, and blockchain infrastructure is a global computing layer. Regulation is emerging in many regions.
A large share of stablecoin adoption is already happening outside the US, he said, and Circle’s opportunity spans 185 countries. Dozens of countries are generating demand for stablecoins. Looking only at what rules let US companies operate right now can obscure the scale of the broader shift.
He said Circle still wants to see the law passed, and if it does not happen in September, Congress can continue to work on it later. At the same time, US regulators have already signaled that they will use guidance and rulemaking to help digital asset markets develop in a trusted, safe and compliant way. For that reason, Allaire said, he still expects USDC to keep growing even without a September passage of the CLARITY Act.
He closed the AMA by thanking participants and saying he looked forward to more conversations in coming quarters.