Circle co-founder, chairman and CEO Jeremy Allaire spent nearly 47 minutes on Aug. 19, 2026 answering 11 investor questions during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings AMA, covering execution, stablecoin use cases, USDC’s payment opportunity, Circle’s long-term business model, Arc’s five-year outlook, trust in the AI agent economy, CPN, EURC, and whether USDC can keep growing without the CLARITY Act passing in September.
At the start of the session, Allaire said Circle had just released its second-quarter results and wanted to open the discussion to a broader group of followers interested in the company’s strategy and what it is trying to execute.
Execution, hiring discipline and what Circle still needs to build
Asked what gives him confidence in Circle’s execution as the company expands across payments, Arc, capital markets and financial infrastructure, Allaire said Circle is executing well and has been shipping products and capabilities at a fast pace since its IPO.
He tied that speed to the company’s cross-functional operating structure. Circle has to launch financial infrastructure, regulated financial products and platform infrastructure at the same time, which requires deep coordination across teams. He said the company has also avoided explosive hiring, choosing slower and steadier headcount growth so it can build institutional depth. Many leaders across key functions have been with Circle for a long time, which he said has created strong institutional cohesion.
Allaire added that Circle has begun using AI and agentic infrastructure deeply, starting with software engineering and spreading across the organization. He described AI as a capability amplifier and said the people who can use it best will need broader interdisciplinary and cross-functional skills, including the ability to coordinate both humans and AI agents.
He also framed Circle as a technology company. Allaire said he has spent around 30 years building internet software platforms, and that many of Circle’s product and engineering leaders came from leading global technology companies. In his view, the problems Circle is solving depend heavily on technical innovation, and the pace of that innovation is increasing.
As for gaps, he named two areas. One is cyber risk, which he said is changing quickly and matters even more as Circle starts to resemble core financial market infrastructure relied on by major companies and financial institutions. The other is global operations. Circle first built core markets and then moved into major financial centers, but now sees large growth opportunities across dozens of emerging markets and other countries. To reach them, it is building more local capacity in staffing, operations and infrastructure.
Where stablecoins are already solving real problems at scale
Allaire described stablecoins as a general-purpose digital money architecture with a very wide application range. At one end, AI agents can pay fractions of a cent to other AI agents for reasoning, data processing and other forms of cognitive labor, something the traditional financial system was not built to support. At the other end, major capital markets firms are already using stablecoins and USDC as working capital and collateral, while multinational companies are using Circle’s products and stablecoins for global treasury management and internal fund movement.
He said several use cases are already showing clear product-market fit.
The first is the digital asset market. Stablecoins offer a reliable digital dollar that works globally around the clock, which fits a 24/7 market. In that setting, stablecoins are used for working capital, collateral, cash management, trade settlement and payments.
He said that market itself is changing. Over time, the assets being traded will broaden beyond Bitcoin and traditional crypto assets to include more categories of assets and real-world assets. In his view, the capabilities tied to 24/7 markets, tokenization and globally software-driven markets are starting to move into traditional capital markets. He said the convergence of traditional finance and onchain finance has begun, though it is still early.
The second scaled use case, he said, is digital dollar savings in emerging markets. Demand for USDC and other digital dollars is growing in many parts of the world. For small and midsize businesses, households and even some larger companies, stablecoins are starting to act like a near substitute for a $1 bank account and are being used for commerce, savings, investment and cross-border payments.
The third is cross-border settlement and international payments. Stablecoins can serve as the settlement leg of cross-border transactions, and in many cases they are also the final form of money received. Allaire said Circle is already seeing this through CPN. Payment companies, fintech firms and banks are working with Circle to integrate USDC into their settlement flows, while networks such as Visa and Mastercard are also adopting stablecoins for cross-border settlement.
He said the next big area should be the agentic economy, where programmable money and machine-mediated financial infrastructure fit naturally. He also expects stablecoins to keep moving deeper into traditional financial markets. Retail merchant payments, in his view, should arrive over the next few years, though that market still needs time before it reaches large scale.
USDC’s biggest payments opportunities
When asked where USDC has the largest opening in global payments, Allaire pointed to cross-border settlement, capital markets payments and settlement, and agentic payments.
He gave one specific data point on AI-related flows: on agent payment protocols such as x402, more than 99% of agent payments are using USDC. He said AI agents need a reliable currency, a broadly accepted unit of account, fast settlement, very low costs and deterministic execution, which makes USDC a strong fit.
He also highlighted retail payments, especially the rapid growth of "stablecoin cards." According to Allaire, a new class of neo-bank products is being built around stablecoins. Users can hold stablecoins in wallets, send and receive them, deploy them into DeFi, invest in digital assets and real-world assets, and then spend stablecoin balances through existing card rails. Circle, he said, is working with nearly all major companies in that category and is seeing strong growth.
Beyond that, he said point-of-sale payments could shift as well. In many Asian and Latin American markets, QR codes have become a major point-of-sale method. That makes the jump from holding stablecoins in a mobile wallet to settling them directly to merchants through QR code payments much shorter than many people assume. He argued that instant settlement and very low fees can materially improve merchant unit economics.
Allaire said that as stablecoins become recognized as lawful electronic money in major markets, especially once the U.S. GENIUS Act takes effect, merchant acceptance infrastructure should accelerate its support for stablecoin payments.
Reserve income remains central, but Circle is building beyond it
On Circle’s long-term revenue mix, Allaire said investors should keep in mind how early the market still is. Onchain stablecoins today total about $300 billion, while the infrastructure supporting this new financial system has spent more than a decade maturing and is only now approaching the point where institutions can adopt it at scale.
He compared the current stage of onchain finance and stablecoins to the internet around 2002. The first wave had happened, good products existed alongside failures, and capital had already entered the sector, yet the broader buildout was still in front of it. In that analogy, he said, internet financial systems, stablecoins and onchain infrastructure are now at a similar moment.
From that starting point, he expects stablecoins to grow from the hundreds of billions into the trillions of dollars. To get there, Circle will need global distribution partners and platforms, and those partners will need incentives to participate. The company wants major financial institutions, technology companies and fintech firms to embed Circle’s infrastructure, generate revenue from it and reward their own users through it.
That is why reserve income will remain a powerful economic engine for Circle, he said, even as more of that value gets shared across the ecosystem. Circle’s aim is not to maximize profits from the current business base but to help scale the ecosystem into the trillions, with USDC broadly integrated into the global financial and economic system.
At the same time, Circle is building transaction and infrastructure revenue streams. Allaire said CPN, the onchain payment network, has only been operating in real terms for about a year but is already showing strong growth. He said Circle believes CPN can monetize through per-transaction fees and added-value services built into the network.
He described Arc as an "economic operating system" and an "economic cloud," and said Circle views it as an opportunity on the scale of Amazon Web Services. As AI drives more applications, he expects Arc to become a meaningful new revenue source.
Arc’s five-year vision and the idea of onchain corporations
Allaire said Circle has been thinking about infrastructure for internet economic activity for roughly 13 years. When the company was founded in 2013, one of its core ideas was that blockchains would eventually become distributed computing networks where code, in the form of smart contracts, could directly participate in and coordinate economic activity, while records and assets of many kinds could be issued onto those networks.
At the time, he said, that idea felt distant. Over the past decade, the industry has gone through multiple iterations, and Circle now sees a more unusual convergence: legal systems are beginning to prepare for this technology, the technology itself has moved into what he described as a fourth-generation capability phase, and governments, financial institutions and technology firms increasingly recognize this as future economic infrastructure.
Allaire argued that blockchains are becoming an operating system, not just a venue for speculative crypto trading or even payments. In his framing, they are distributed network operating systems for running applications with economic properties, and over time they will host economic activity itself.
He gave the example of a company. A company is fundamentally a set of contractual relationships: ownership structures, contracts around that ownership, mechanisms for investment, cash flows and dividends to investors, corporate treasury management and all the contracts required to operate globally. He said those systems will gradually move onchain, producing onchain corporations that are increasingly coordinated by software, with that software itself increasingly created and run by AI.
His broader thesis is that operating systems for intelligence and operating systems for economic activity will merge. Over the next five years, he expects businesses to become more onchain and more agentic, and expects interactions, transactions, contracts and back-office systems to move into that environment.
Circle wants to build Arc with a global set of participants that can run, upgrade and govern infrastructure while also earning from it. If more economic activity moves into those systems, he said, then the role of onchain money such as USDC and EURC expands naturally.
Trust primitives for AI agents spending USDC
Allaire said Circle has been thinking hard about what trust has to look like before autonomous agents can discover services and pay each other with USDC. A week before the AMA, Circle published a paper titled The Open Economy for Agents, laying out what an agentic economy needs and what Circle Agent Stack already provides, along with the functions Circle plans to build through the rest of the year.
He grouped the problem into three areas.
The first is "Know Your Agent," or KYA. Just as Circle must know its customers, it needs ways to confirm the identity of end users, enterprises and agent operators. In the future, when agents interact with other agents or with people and companies, cryptographic proofs, assertions, attestations and verifiable identity will be needed to show who an agent is and what permissions and capabilities it has.
Circle wants those capabilities to fit with emerging standards for agent identity and agent registries. Allaire compared the need to the certificate authority model on the internet, where a trust layer helps establish whether a network endpoint can be relied on.
The second issue is reputation. He said reputation systems are difficult because internet ratings are easy to manipulate. Circle is studying ways to create continuous feedback loops in which agent use, transactions, settlement activity and real interactions with users and other agents generate data that can anchor more credible reputation systems.
The third is programmable policy. Circle has already started to provide this through its agent wallet, which can set spending policies that control how much an agent can spend and who it can transact with. Allaire said Circle plans to expand those functions further.
He said KYA, reputation and programmable policies are central pieces of the trust stack for the agent economy, and noted that Circle is participating in standards efforts including the x402 Foundation.
How Allaire manages energy and focus for the long haul
One of the questions focused on Allaire personally and what he does to stay healthy enough to pursue a long-term mission like Circle. He said that about 10 years ago he realized that if he wanted to take on a mission this complex over the long run, he had to change some of the habits he had when he was younger.
He said he has become highly disciplined in a few areas. The first is diet and physical health. The second is sleep, where he follows a strict and stable routine and places a high priority on both duration and quality. The third is mindfulness, which he said is also one of Circle’s core values. In his description, mindfulness goes beyond meditation and includes how people face the world, how they listen actively and whether they can stay present with others.
He said that practice helps him avoid catastrophic thinking, meaning the habit of imagining the worst possible outcome when facing a problem. Instead, he tries to stay calm, accept what is happening and work through challenges one step at a time. He also maintains regular exercise across different types of physical activity and said those habits support both his energy and his mental acuity, while helping him stay connected with his family.
CPN partners, extensibility and a broader alliance network
On whether Circle has a formal program for partners that want to help scale CPN, Allaire said yes. Circle’s website already has an application path for companies seeking to become CPN partners.
He said the latest earnings report disclosed that more than 175 financial institutions have joined CPN and are connecting to the network in different ways, depending on the nature of their business. Circle is also making CPN more extensible so third parties can add value-added services to it. One example he cited was trade finance. He said Circle already has some cases in which credit facilities are being provided to support cross-border settlement.
Circle also has a dedicated global business development team focused on payments and CPN. Beyond that, it runs the Circle Alliance Program, a broader global partner network that already includes thousands of companies and offers members additional ways to connect and work with Circle.
Why EURC reached more than €400 million so quickly
When asked about EURC, Allaire first corrected the phrasing of the question. The milestone was not $400 million but more than €400 million in circulation. He said Circle is very pleased with EURC’s early development and described it as one of the largest digital euros globally.
He added that the euro stablecoin market remains small compared with dollar stablecoins. All euro stablecoins combined are still worth only about €1 billion.
He credited EURC’s growth to several factors. Circle moved early and committed from the beginning to issuing a euro stablecoin under the European regulatory framework. It worked with European regulators and financial institutions and built the needed infrastructure in advance, which meant EURC was ready when MiCA took effect.
Circle also used the partner and distribution network it had already built for USDC. With exchanges across Europe supporting EURC and users able to mint and redeem it at 1:1 through different platforms, the token had a ready path into the market. The company also worked with major DeFi protocols to create EURC markets, lending venues, swaps and USDC/EURC FX tools.
Allaire said the opportunity is still early. If dollar stablecoins are early, digital euros and euro stablecoins are even earlier. He said onchain money is better than traditional electronic money and legacy money systems, and argued that demand for euro stablecoins should rise as MiCA evolves, as Europe opens more capital markets and real-world asset opportunities, and as programmable money and cross-border settlement use cases grow. He also said EURC could find demand in emerging markets as firms and households diversify currency exposure.
Arc as infrastructure users barely notice
Asked whether Arc’s biggest strength might be that it allows consumer-facing blockchain products to hide crypto in the background, Allaire largely agreed. He said Arc’s public mainnet is scheduled to go live on Sept. 16 and that the chain has about five core capabilities, with AI-native and agentic applications being one of them.
Arc is a stablecoin-native chain, he said, and both gas and the fee model use USDC. That means users do not need to buy another crypto token or understand how gas works in order to use an application. Transaction fees are usually only fractions of a cent, low enough that developers can absorb them.
He compared that design to Netflix running on Amazon Web Services. Users paying Netflix do not see a separate line item for AWS usage. In the same way, he argued, blockchain applications should not force users to care about which underlying network they are on or how much the transaction and data layer costs. Arc’s purpose is to make that layer disappear from the user experience.
That is also useful for enterprises. Allaire said businesses do not want to hold multiple digital commodities, deal with complex accounting and compliance treatment, or manage custody arrangements simply to build an application. If they can operate infrastructure using digital dollars instead, the process is easier from a financial, legal and compliance perspective.
He said Arc was designed in part to make the underlying operating system invisible to users. In his view, if blockchain technology is going to serve billions of people, the technical substrate has to become almost entirely hidden. He called Arc one of the most important attempts in blockchain history to create that kind of seamless user experience.
Circle’s focus around that launch is on developers. Allaire said platform businesses rise or fall with their developer base, so the company is preparing products to launch with the September mainnet in order to help developers build quickly, safely and reliably. In the current threat environment, he said, safety, trustworthiness, infrastructure robustness and simplicity all matter more.
USDC growth without the CLARITY Act
On the final question, Allaire said plainly that USDC adoption would continue to grow even if the CLARITY Act does not pass in September.
His first reason was that stablecoins are becoming part of the lawful financial system across many jurisdictions, and in several places stablecoin legislation is moving faster than broader market-structure legislation for crypto assets. He cited Japan and Europe, and said the U.S. has already passed the GENIUS Act, which will take effect in January and formally place digital dollars such as USDC inside the U.S. financial system and the broader dollar financial system.
He still called the CLARITY Act important because the rest of the market — trading venues, derivatives, tokenization and capital markets — also needs clear registration and regulatory structures. But he argued that stablecoin adoption has its own independent growth logic, even if there are synergies between stablecoin law and broader market-structure law.
Allaire also warned against viewing the issue only through a U.S. lens. Digital assets and digital money are global by nature, blockchain infrastructure is a global computing infrastructure, and many jurisdictions are writing their own rules. A large share of stablecoin adoption, he said, is already taking place outside the United States. Circle sees opportunity across 185 countries, with demand emerging in dozens of them.
Even if the bill does not pass in September, he said, Congress can continue work later. He also noted that U.S. regulators have said they will use guidance and rulemaking to help digital asset markets develop in a credible, safe and compliant way. For those reasons, he said, USDC’s growth should continue regardless.