Circle Internet Group, Inc. (CRCL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

During today's conversation, we may make forward-looking statements, which may vary materially from actual results. Any information shared concerning risks, uncertainties or other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings. We may also reference non-GAAP financial measures, definitions of those non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations can be found in the earnings presentation on our Investor Relations website.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're tuning in from. Welcome to this Circle Earnings AMA. I'm really thrilled to have this time to answer questions and engage with everyone out there about Circle, our strategy, what we're trying to execute. We obviously just came off of our Q2 earnings, shared a lot, but now we want to have an opportunity to open up and have more questions from the broader audience of folks that are interested in Circle. So I'm going to kick in and please, as we go, try and submit questions. We're trying to pull in as many as we can as we go through this.

First question from, Lufei. As Circle expands across payments, Arc, capital markets and financial infrastructure, what gives you the greatest confidence in the team's ability to execute ?and what capability do you most need to strengthen? This is a great question. And I think as a CEO and really our whole board as well, but as a CEO, specifically, I'm always trying to think about the team, how we're executing, what needs to evolve from where we are. And I would really speak to a few things here. I think the first is, I do believe that Circle is executing really well, just overall. So first, I'd just say, since our IPO, our product velocity, the ability for us to launch and bring new products, new capabilities to market has been pretty tremendous. And I think that builds on years of very strong cross-functional processes to bring these financial infrastructure and sometimes regulated financial products but also platform infrastructure products into the market. One thing I'd say about the team is that while we've continued to grow -- our growth has been slow and steady. It's not been -- we've not sort of done explosive growth, adding huge, huge numbers of people. We've really tried to calibrate that growth and make sure that we've got really good kind of institutional depth within the business. So the leaders across the pillars of the business and across key demands of the business have been with us. And so there's that again, that institutional cohesion that's there. Now another thing I'd like to speak about here in this is we, like a lot of other companies, have really begun to deeply harness AI and agentic infrastructure. So that's really started in our software engineering, but it's now expanding across the organization. And I think, this is a very unique moment. What I sort of say to the team members of the company is, this is one of the greatest opportunities you'll ever have in your career because you're being given kind of new amplification, new superpowers. And so in order to kind of harness this, it really is an opportunity for us to deepen what I would broadly kind of call interdisciplinary and cross-functional skills. The individuals that know how to orchestrate and work with both humans and agents across domains are going to be the most effective. And we're seeing that again in terms of the velocity of what we can bring into the market. I would also note that Circle, both by my heritage as an Internet software platform developer, that's really what I've done for about 30 years, but also more broadly, the product and engineering leadership, a lot of the leadership in the company comes out of really the leading technology companies in the world. And so we are a technology company. We think of ourselves as a technology company. And the problem space that we're in is about -- fundamentally, it's about technical innovation, and so our velocity of technical innovation is increasing, and that's really, really critical. In terms of areas to strengthen, there are always areas to strengthen. I think as we take on a bigger and bigger role as a financial market infrastructure that the world's leading companies, the world's leading financial institutions depend on, that requires new skills. And I think all of us everywhere are faced with the challenges of cyber risk. That is very much a rapidly changing dimension, and we're seeing that obviously play out in crypto, but in many other areas. And so strengthening in that area is key. And then for Circle as well, we started with the strategy of, obviously, kind of building our home base and then expanding into kind of hub financial market centers with our infrastructure and our liquidity and operations. And now we're seeing tremendous opportunities to grow in dozens of other emerging markets and other countries around the world. And so a key capability that we're building is the ability to expand on the ground with people and operations and infrastructure to reach into the markets where we see enormous demand for Arc, for CPN, for USDC, stablecoins, other digital assets that we have. And so those are some of the things that we're focused on. It's a great question. Next question from, viralfacts3122. Which real-world financial problem do you think stablecoins are closest to solving at scale? So I think we think about this a ton, obviously. And I think one of the things that I often say is stablecoin money is sort of general purpose, general architecture, digital money. And literally, today, if you look at the spectrum of use cases that we're seeing today at the very -- one end of the spectrum, we have AI agents paying other AI agents, fractions of a cent to do some cognitive labor using inference and/or working with data and providing that back that's at the very micro end of the scale and something that was never possible before with the financial system. And at the other end, we have large capital markets firms that are using stablecoins and USDC, as working capital and collateral for traditional derivatives infrastructure, and we have large global corporations that are now using Circle's products and stablecoins to do global treasury management, internal money movement, and many, many other things. But I think to get to the heart of the question, which is like what's being solved now? What's being solved at scale? We very clearly have seen sort of product market fit for stablecoins in several places. So one, obviously, stablecoins are 24/7, 365, globally available, reliable digital dollars and that works really well, where you have 24/7, 365, globally available markets. So that obviously started with digital asset markets. So as working capital, as collateral, as cash, as settlement, and payments in digital asset markets, tremendous product market fit. Now that is a real-world need. And one of the key points that we talked about in the earnings call is that digital asset markets themselves are transforming into not just trading things like Bitcoin or trading these "crypto assets," it's trading all assets, it's trading real-world assets. And so we're seeing this shift where the power of 24/7 markets, the power of digital tokenization, the power of globally available, software-enabled markets is coming into traditional markets. And so trading equities or trading commodities plays a real-world economic function. It is price discovery. It is obviously capital invested that supports companies and their operations, that informs the equity value of those businesses. And so that convergence is there. That's nascent, but that is there. We're also seeing, I think, all around the world, and we've talked about this, in emerging markets and in global markets, the demand for digital dollars in the form of things like USDC, is growing as a store of value, as essentially a dollar banking substitute, where SMEs, households, and even some large enterprises are basically moving to use stablecoins as an alternative to their own local banking systems. And so that's really supporting commerce. It's supporting savings and investment, and it's supporting cross-border payments. And so we see that today. We think that, that is a problem. That actually is being solved at scale when you think about the many hundreds of millions of users that are engaging with stablecoins globally. There's a big cross-section there. We think that, that obviously can be a lot bigger. Another area, obviously, we're seeing it in our own product line adoption is in cross-border settlements, international payments and cross-border settlements where stablecoins can be used as the settlement leg and increasingly stablecoins are not just used as a settlement leg, they're actually used as the destination money as well. So pay-ins and pay-outs, store value, but cross-border in nature. And obviously, we see that today with CPN and we see that more generally, lots of cross-border firms, cross-border fintechs and banks that do work in cross-border are working with us to integrate USDC into their cross-border settlement capabilities, and large payment networks themselves, like Visa, Mastercard doing cross-border settlements where you've got issuers in one market able to settle very quickly. So those are some of the things that we're seeing. I think just on the horizon, agentic, we believe is going to be an enormous category of activity and really stablecoins and programmable money, and machine intermediated financial infrastructure is purpose built for this world of agentic. We see, obviously, this penetration of stablecoins into traditional financial markets, this convergence of TradFi and on-chain, continuing to happen and drive things. And then ultimately, obviously, we believe that stablecoins will solve retail payment acceptance in some very, very powerful novel ways, with materially improved unit economics for merchants and with new utility for consumers themselves in areas like Affinity, Rewards and the like. That piece, I think, will come over the next couple of years, but we believe ultimately, this form of money will be a superior form of money for merchant acceptance, but we're not there yet. That is not at scale. It's a great question. Thank you. Okay. Question #3, fascinatingwatch594. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for USDC in global payments? Okay. Well, this is a little bit of what we just talked about. I'll just maybe keep this a little bit shorter. So cross-border settlements, capital markets, payments and settlements, obviously, agentic payments, I would say one other thing here, which is AI agents exists sort of in the cloud as it were. They exist on the Internet. And they're quite deterministic in terms of how they look to solve problems. And -- my own belief is that -- and we're seeing this already today in the numbers were 99.x percent of all agentic payments are happening over -- that are happening over these agentic payment protocols, are happening with USDC is that AI agents are focused on reliable money, a unit of account that's widely accepted, fast, extremely inexpensive settlement and deterministic in nature. And so we think it's very, very valuable there. I think we touched on the broadly like the retail payments concept. I think right now, what we're seeing with stablecoin payments is essentially the sort of stablecoin cards phenomenon where basically there are traditional -- there are newer really neo banking products that are built on stablecoins. And so you have a digital wallet, you have stablecoins. You can make and receive stablecoin transaction. You can take your stablecoins, take them in DeFi. You can use them to invest in digital assets, real-world assets and other things, but you can actually take those stablecoins and use them as the balance to spend that traditional merchants through card networks. And so we've seen the charts. We work with a lot of the companies, in fact, almost all companies in that arena, and are seeing this really strong growth there. I do think, though, at some point, at the point of sale, as we've seen in many markets where point-of-sale has been our QR codes or equivalent. In many, many Asian markets and in Latin American markets, the leap of having a digital store of value that can settle instantly in a cross-border way, the leap of going from stablecoins in a wallet on a phone to stablecoins that are settled instantly to a business or a merchant using these QR code type methods, I don't think we're far away from that. We don't need card terminals to do that. The world has demonstrated that we can upgrade to new payment acceptance methods that just use QR codes. And so I think this is an inevitable thing, and I think that again, the unit economics of instant settlement of very, very low-cost fees are really key. And at this point, now with stablecoins basically becoming legal electronic money in most major markets, with GENIUS Act in the U.S. going effective in January that will make things like USDC legal electronic money in the U.S., therefore, the global financial system, the accounting rules for companies. I think we're going to see a big acceleration in companies that are in that merchant acceptance chain, upgrading to support kind of payment acceptance in that way. That will take time to scale, but it seems like an inevitable space for this as well. Okay. Next question, noahplumb5409. Jeremy, long term, do you see Circle's primary economic engine as USDC reserve income, or the transaction and infrastructure revenue being built around USDC? It's a great question. I mean, we look at where we are today, and I would say a few things. The first is that -- and I say this all the time to investors, to my board, and obviously to all my employees. We are in the very early stages of the development of this market opportunity. If you think about where we are today, there's a mere $300 billion-ish stablecoins in circulation. On-chain infrastructure, the computing infrastructure that runs this emerging financial and economic system is, while it's been around for a decade plus, the technology is just now getting to a point where it is sort of at a level where it can be institutionally adopted and accepted. It is at a level where the kind of critical policymakers and regulators are going to be comfortable with moving the world's economic activity onto this infrastructure. And when we, again, look at the TAM for not just electronic money itself, but for all of the utilities that use that in the world, the capital markets utilities, the payments utilities, the money movement utilities, and the like, you realize that we're just a tiny drop in the bucket. And I think, by analogy, I think we're in the 2002 of the adoption of this technology. There's been a wave. There's been some really great products that have been built. There's been a lot of failures. There's been a lot of capital come in, but we're at the front end. And 2002 was actually right after or during kind of a bear market in the Internet and Internet technology, but it's actually really from that point onward, we just saw -- began to see this kind of progressive linear scaling and growth and maturation and then the sort of pervasiveness of the web, and of Internet software and digital media, communications and the like, into the world. And so that's where I see we are with the Internet financial system. That's where I see we are with stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure. So with that said, it really -- it means a few things. So one is we're thinking about a market where stablecoin money is in the trillions of dollars over time. And we talk about that and what kind of growth rates might look like over time, but I think our view is this is superior form of money, is ultra safe money and will be very, very widely circulated. And I think there's a transformation that's going to be underway, both internally in terms of what Circle does and how we monetize, but also in the world at large. And so I think that really represents a few things. The first is that, to get from a few hundred billion to trillions, we're going to -- we need to work with and incentivize distributors and platforms all around the world to build on this. And so I think one is just working with world-class financial companies, working with world-class technology and fintech companies to embed this infrastructure, to adopt this infrastructure, for them to be able to monetize this, for them to be able to reward their own users and to get this from where we are today to that scale. So that will drive reserve income, and that reserve income, obviously, will remain a very, very powerful engine for Circle, but it's also going to be a distributor. It's going to be -- everyone grows, the ecosystem grows. And obviously, there's like a trade space there for us that we have to continually work on. But we're here not for milking what we can out of the cow that's here right now. We're here about kind of building this out into the trillions and getting this widely integrated into the financial and economic system. Alongside that, though, and we're very, very deliberately building out a wide array of products and platforms and services. And these span monetization around transactions on our blockchain infrastructure, these expand into effectively new partnership models that we can monetize to bring our digital assets and our protocols to more and more platforms. This includes the growth of a very unique model for payments with CPN and a on-chain payment network model, which, again, we're really just about a year into. We've seen very, very strong growth in that and we believe that, that is a network model that can monetize at the transactional level and with other value-added services that become embedded in that network. And then obviously, with Arc and economic operating system, this creates a tremendous new model. We think of it as a sort of Amazon Web Services scale opportunity. It's something where we believe this kind of economic cloud, if you will, is going to get adopted and used for an extraordinarily broad range of applications. And with the acceleration of AI, the proliferation of applications will be even higher than it's ever been. And so that is an environment that will -- I think we may have another question about this as well, but creates, again, significant new monetization for us as well. So the reality is we will continue to monetize the reserve income. We want to scale that and distribute that so that we have a massively adopted and very strong utility with tremendous network effects as we have today, but at a significant multiple, if not in order of magnitude larger, and then building up the stack with the applications, down the stack with infrastructure and then monetization with other digital assets and protocols that we offer to the market. Okay. Okay. Oxbankas. What is your vision for USDC, Arc in the next 5 years? I think, this kind of builds on a little bit of what I just talked about, and maybe I'll start actually with Arc in this case. We've been thinking about and working on this infrastructure for economic activity on the Internet now for about 13 years. And when we started Circle back in 2013, a foundational idea was that blockchains would become distributed computing networks that they would enable you to publish and write code in the form of smart contracts, that could intermediate economic activity, and that could then issue any kind of record and any kind of asset into those computing networks. Now back in 2013, this was total pie in the sky. And we saw iterations through these ideas. We've been very excited about the progress there. But we're now kind of hitting a very unique moment. We're hitting a moment where the legal systems are becoming ready for this technology. We're seeing a kind of fourth generation of technology capability, and we're seeing the world's kind of -- not just governments, but the world's leading financial and technology companies, all kind of coming around to realize that this technology, this economic infrastructure is going to be a critical part of the future. And so we think the timing on this is really powerful because of that. And our vision for this, a lot of people have thought about blockchains as these are for trading speculative crypto assets or maybe these are going to be used for payments. I think our view is that, effectively, these are becoming operating systems, they're distributed network operating systems and they're purpose-built for a class of applications that are economic in nature. That's not just storing and moving money around. It is actually taking the substance of the economy. And so my own view is that when you think about the substance of the economy, you're talking about a firm itself. What is a firm? A firm is -- its nexus of contracts. A firm is -- its ownership structure. It is the contract around the ownership structure, the mechanism of investing into it, the mechanism of delivering cash flows and dividends out of it. It is the treasury management function of that business. And it's the contracts that, that firm needs to engage in around the world. That entire apparatus, the apparatus of the firm is going to move into an on-chain world. we will have on-chain corporations. These on-chain corporations will increasingly be mediated and intermediated by software. And that software will increasingly be both created by and intermediated by AI. And so I have this broader kind of thesis around kind of operating systems for intelligence and operating systems for economic activity, converging. But I think that, that is what's going to play out over the next 5 years. We will see that the nature of the firm change to become much more on-chain and agentic, and we'll see that infrastructure come alive there. And so what does that mean? It means that the entire back plane for what corporations are, for how they interact, transact, et cetera, is going to move into this kind of world. So we see a huge, huge opportunity there, not just at the operating system level. And there, we're trying to do this with many stakeholders, with many different participants from all around the world to participate in running that infrastructure, evolving that infrastructure, governing that infrastructure and benefiting economically from that infrastructure. If that takes place, obviously, the role of on-chain money, such as USDC, grows with it. If more and more of the economic activity of the world, not just the financial market activity, but the broader economic activity of the world, is going to be intermediated and run on these operating systems and run through these on-chain types of organizations. The role of stablecoins of digital money such as USDC, EURC, et cetera, will grow, I think, in extraordinary ways. Okay. Next question, pawansatoshix. If AI agents can autonomously discover services and pay with USDC, what becomes the trust primitive before money moves? Could reputation and verifiable identity attestations and programmable spending policies become the missing trust layer for agent-to-agent commerce? This is a great question. It's something that I think we think about a ton, and I think a lot of our industry peers are also thinking about. And in fact, just in the last week, we published a paper, the open economy for agents. And in that paper, we outlined exactly what we think is needed for this agentic economic system to really take hold. And in that paper, we outlined what we've already delivered with Circle agent stack and the primitives that we're building in our own kind of infrastructure and tooling, but also the road map for what we're going to be delivering over the remainder of this year. And so I would highly encourage if you're interested in this area, we're being very transparent about this. And a big piece of that road map is addressing exactly these issues. We need several things to happen, and we're working on it. One is we need to be able to know your agent. We need to be able to -- just as Circle knows its customers, we know and underwrite the identity of end users and businesses and others, and this is something that regulated financial firms are required to do. So we have really good capabilities for that kind of process. We need to be able to support the builders of agents to basically have 'know your agent' capabilities. So as that agent interacts with other agents and as businesses and users interact with the agent itself that we can use crypto, meaning verifiable cryptographic proofs to prove and provide assertions and attestations, exactly what you're referencing in your question, about that agent. And so this is a very key building block, and we're working on this, and we want to have that tied to existing standards around agent identity, agent registries and the like. And there's really good models for this that we already have from the Internet, certificate authorities and things like that, that kind of provide an assurance layer for that you know you're interacting with a trustworthy end point. And so bringing that into the agentic space is really key. But I think the other is essentially reputation, and reputation is an interesting one because there's so much gamification that takes place in that, and we see that in online listings and in different open marketplaces on the Internet. And so kind of validating the reputation and capabilities of AI is also a huge problem space. And so we're working on designs in that arena as well so that you can have a continuous feedback loop, whereas agents are used as more settlement happens and as more agents and people who consume and use agents have experiences with these, that that's able to generate the kind of data that's necessary to actually provide strong reputation. And then obviously, the programmable policies. So that's something that we've already started launching with our Agent Wallets. Our Agent Wallets can have spending policies, and you can have programmatic control over these things, and we're continuing to enhance that. But all of these are really powerful pieces of the puzzle. And we're super excited about it. And I think Circle is not doing this alone. We're working with standards efforts that are in the blockchain ecosystem. We're working with standards efforts as a kind of a principal, a founding member of x402 Foundation and others. But there's a huge amount of work happening here, and I would encourage you to kind of read what we just published as well. All right. Another question from, Lufei. Circle is clearly a long-term mission for you. What do you personally do to stay healthy and sustain the energy and mental clarity that mission demands? I love this question, and I'll share some personal things here, which is a number of years ago, almost 10 years ago, it became really clear to me that in order to accomplish a complex mission like Circle, in order to kind of bring my best self to this, I needed to do a lot of things differently than in younger parts of my life, let's just say. And so I became very, very disciplined around a number of things. I became very disciplined around what I put in my body. So I'm very clean and very healthy in that respect and so paid very, very close attention to kind of what it is that -- what -- the substances that I'll allow into my body. I have a very -- I think, a very rigorous and consistent sleep regime. I think it's really critical to have the sufficient and sufficient quality of sleep. So I have a lot of things that I try to do to make sure that, that is the case. I practice mindfulness and actually mindfulness is a core value for the company. And it means a lot of different things. It's not just about meditation. It's about how we how show up in the world, it's active listening, it's the presence that we have with other people, it's a practice, which I think, is probably more Buddhist than anything that really doesn't allow kind of catastrophic thinking or challenges to overwhelm ourselves. It's to sort of I think, calmly accept things as they come and take them one step at a time, one day at a time, et cetera. So I think that's been really important. And then just overall physical health. And so I have a fairly active kind of exercise regime across a number of different things to focus on health. And so those are really important. And I think what's nice about it is that I have strong energy, I have mental acuity. I believe that I'm able to connect and relate to people really effectively, including family, my children and everything else and having that balance is really key. But I would agree these long term complex missions that are always throwing challenges at you. It's never easy. It's never straightforward. It requires a lot of discipline in terms of how we approach things. And so that's just a little bit of insight into how I approach life and this mission. Okay. nomadcindyy. Is there a formal partner referral ecosystem or business development program through which companies can help expand CPN? The answer is, yes. Absolutely. So I believe that if you go to circle.com and if you go into CPN, there's a section in there to become a CPN partner. And -- what I'd say there is a couple of things. So one is, there are, as noted in our most recent earnings calls, over 175 financial institutions that are now members of CPN and plugging in, in different ways. And so one is, depending on what role your own firm plays, you can obviously connect and plug in. But we're also working on essentially the kind of extensibility of CPN and enabling third-party services that add value to the network to plug in. We've had a couple of examples of that in trade finance, as an example, dealing with kind of kind of credit facilities for some of these cross-border settlements. But we have a dedicated business development arm that is exclusively focused on payments in CPN. And so if you kind of come in through that front door, you can plug into that team. And that's a global team in every region of the world. So I would encourage you to check that out. All right. I would also say one last thing is, we also have the Circle Alliance Program, which is our broader global partnership program. And that's something where -- I mean there are, I think, thousands of companies in that, and we have an incredibly broad array of partners. And so you can apply to become a member of that. There are certain benefits that come along with that and connectivity into Circle and other opportunities alongside Circle that come with joining our Alliance network as well. All right. Okay. This is somtouwazie504. What measures did Circle take that was responsible for EURC getting to $400 million in circulation in so short period? And are there measures to keep it that way? We're really pleased with the early success of our euro stablecoin. As we just shared, it crossed EUR 400 million in circulation, not $400 million in circulation, but EUR 400 million in circulation, and is the largest digital euro in the world. Now when we -- in a world of hundreds of billions of dollar stablecoins and versus, say, hundreds of millions of euro, I think maybe it's -- the total market cap of euro stablecoins is, I think, approaching EUR 1 billion, still quite small. I mean, look, the things that made it successful for us, I mean, one was we were very early. We made a very strong commitment to launch a euro stablecoin under the European regulatory framework from day 1. We worked with European regulators. We worked with financial institutions. We made sure we have the infrastructure and the apparatus there. And so the day that MiCA became effective, our euro stablecoin was there and available in the market. The second is we built on the great partnerships that we already have, the distribution relationships that we have and the role that we've already established with USDC in the ecosystem, and we've been able to build on that to drive EURC adoption. So that's on exchanges and wallets. Many of the leading exchanges in Europe support EURC, and there's minting and redemption of EURC on a one-for-one basis through a number of these services. We've worked with some of the leading DeFi protocols to create EURC markets, lending and borrowing markets, swaps, USDC, EURC kind of FX tools, conversion tools. So we've seen that. And I think as -- on a go-forward basis, we're -- just like in dollar stablecoins, we're in the very early stages of this. We think we're also obviously very much in the early stages of digital euros and euro stablecoins. But the kind of phrase I like to use is, on-chain money is superior to existing electronic money and legacy money. And so the role of on-chain digital euro is only going to grow. And with MiCA and with revisions that are happening to MiCA, with opening up the capital markets and kind of real-world asset opportunities in the European market, I think that's going to drive demand for more euro stablecoin. And I think as this grows, that will also drive demand for the programmable utility of euro stablecoins. So programmable money, cross-border settlements actually see an opportunity for euro stablecoin in emerging markets and other markets around the world as businesses and households do continue to diversify the currencies that they hold. So all of those, we think are interesting growth opportunities, and we've got quite a few initiatives underway to continue to strengthen the role of EURC globally, but also obviously in the European market itself. All right. Next question from, peterhass. Arc is talking a lot about the agentic economy. But is Arc's greatest strength perhaps that is an end-user-friendly environment, allowing consumer blockchain products that renders crypto invisible? And this is a great question. I think we obviously shared that our Arc public Mainnet is coming on September 16. We're very excited about it. And there are sort of kind of 5 pillars of kind of key capabilities that we see with Arc that are really, really attractive in the market. As you noted, like the agentic and AI native applications is obviously one of those. I would actually point out that one of the things that makes Arc so attractive to AI agents is exactly what you're describing as what makes it attractive to kind of end users as well, which is Arc is a stablecoin native chain. The gas fees and the fee model is USDC. And so someone who needs to use an application on Arc doesn't have to go and get some other crypto token. They don't really need to even understand what like gas fees are. Gas fees are so inexpensive fractions of $0.01 in general, that transaction costs can be borne by the developers themselves. Just -- I use the example of -- if I go use Netflix, Netflix is built on Amazon Web Services. Well, when I go to pay for Netflix, there's not a line item that says like AWS fees or you're paying the compute infrastructure fees as a separate line item to use the Netflix app. That's kind of what it's been like to use blockchain apps, which is completely absurd. There's no reason why users should ever have to think about the fees for the compute network, for the transaction data, infrastructure that the application is built on. Now we have seen some of that improve with delegation and other models in blockchain apps, but it still persists pretty significantly. Arc makes that become, as you said, completely invisible. A developer can effectively absorb those transaction costs. Just like you absorb the cost of paying for your AI inference or paying for your Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud or whatever infrastructure that you're using. And so but also for a developer or a business that's building and deploying an app, they don't want the hassle, the accounting hassle, the compliance hassle, the custody hassle, of needing to think about and deal with these other digital commodities. If they just have digital dollars, they can run their infrastructure. It's much more straightforward from a financial compliance, legal perspective for them as well. So that really assists that. But at the end of the day, I think, to get to the heart of your question, I think you're exactly right. One of the major motivations was that these operating systems need to be invisible to the users. The users just want to use compelling applications, whether those are financial applications or governance applications or agentic applications, they want to use those applications, and they don't care what's underneath. I think the early adopter phase of this market is generally driven by people who are very focused on the technology and are willing to deal with more technical hurdles to use it and benefit from it. But we know very clearly that for these technologies to become completely mainstream, for billions of people to use them, the technology has to be pretty invisible. So Arc I believe is one of the best foot forward in the history of this space to make it possible to have these very seamless user experiences. And that, for us, the way we are going after that is with developers. Because at the end of the day, if you're building a platform business, it's all about the developers that are building, how you're attracting developers, the success the developers are having, the user experience that they can deliver. So we've got some pretty cool stuff cooking, which we're excited to roll out with the Mainnet launch in September, and a big, big piece of that is about activating developers and providing the building blocks so that developers can create these awesome user experiences really fast and safely and securely, which is another key piece, which is the threat environment, the security environment is very different today than it's ever been. And so safety, trustworthiness, infrastructure aboutness and that simplicity are so essential. So thank you for the question. I think it's great, and I appreciate it. Okay. It looks like we're coming up on time. So this is going to be the last question, Jasmine_Sanchesz. Do you believe USDC adoption will continue to grow even if the CLARITY Act doesn't pass in September? My short answer is, yes. Absolutely. I think a couple of things here. I think the first is stablecoins as a legal part of the global financial system is happening, and it's happening everywhere in the world. And in fact, in most jurisdictions, stablecoin laws are happening faster than some of these broader crypto markets laws. And so we've seen that in Japan, in Europe. We're seeing that here in the United States with GENIUS Act, which was passed into law last year, which will go effective in January of this year. That makes digital dollars like USDC, part of the U.S. financial system, part of the dollar financial system, and that's a huge, huge win. And I think, obviously, a critical part of what's going to continue to help drive demand and growth and activity around all of this. Now I do believe that CLARITY is important because we want to see other parts of this market, the trading markets, the derivatives markets, the tokenization and what that can do for capital markets. We want all of this to also have a clear registration regulation structure. That's important for consumer protection. It's important for kind of, I think, market competitiveness. It's important for U.S. competitiveness. So I think that's all important. But that itself is not determinative of the overall adoption and demand for stablecoins. They're synergistic, but it's not determinative. The other thing I'd say here is that I think it's very easy to get overfocused on the United States. and U.S. policy. While U.S. policy is really important, and it does influence policy around the world. Digital assets, digital currencies are highly global. Blockchain infrastructure is a globalized computing infrastructure. The regulations that exist around this are happening everywhere. Stablecoin adoption itself is happening mostly outside the United States. So the opportunity set is 185 countries. The opportunity set is dozens of countries that are driving demand for this. And so if we just get focused on like what are the rules for serving companies or serving markets in the United States, I think we're losing the plot a little bit. This is a highly global phenomenon, and Circle is a very, very global play in all this. Obviously, we'd like to see legislation pass because that would be kind of law -- settled law, as we say. But we also expect -- if we don't see bill passed in September, obviously, Congress will continue to work on this. But the regulators in the United States have made it very, very clear that they will do -- provide guidance and rule-making to ensure that these markets develop in a trustworthy, safe and compliant way. And so I think, in fact, just yesterday or last night, I believe, the SEC published Regulation Crypto, which is a rule-making effort, I believe, around the way that digital tokens can be sold and classified and treated. And so we're seeing that already happening. And so that's what we see with CLARITY. Thanks, everyone, for joining me today for this AMA. I really enjoyed it, and we look forward to chatting again in the coming quarters. Thank you.