Circle Internet Group, Inc. Investor update

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 2 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 2 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 8 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.