Circle Internet Group, Inc. Autonomous 2026 Future of Commerce Symposium

Yeah, thank you. As I shared, and you can watch the launch event if you're more curious than what I'll say here, but Arc is by far the most significant platform launch in the company's history. My view is this is ultimately an opportunity as large or larger than USDC. The ability for the world to move more and more of its economic activity onto the internet, to have the financial activity, the contractual activity, the agentic activity running in software machines on the internet is an enormous opportunity, potentially as large as clouds themselves. This infrastructure is just a tremendous opportunity. As an economic operating system, we really take a very broad horizontal view as to what this will ultimately become. We're very proud of what we've been able to achieve with the launch. I think, several key highlights.

I think the first is, this is a network. This is the first time a major operating system like this has been stood up and is being operated by the world's leading financial infrastructure companies. This is not a network run by Circle. This is a network run by Circle, by Visa, by Mastercard, by the DTCC, by BlackRock, by global systemically important banks and other leaders in digital assets. It is a network with stakeholders from those firms, and it is a network where we will all share in the economics as this scales. The cohort of firms that are running this infrastructure is very unique. This is also one of the very first blockchain operating systems that is designed to meet the requirements of the regulated financial sector.

It meets the requirements of central banks, of securities and markets, regulators that oversee exchanges, and this is critical. If we're actually going through a phase where we're going away from kind of early adopters trading cryptocurrencies to actual money, markets, currencies, and financial contracts running on the internet, you have to have a network that is held to those standards. So it is running to those standards. That is very unique. Also, we launched this network with extraordinary support across the global digital asset ecosystem. Every major exchange, every consumer wallet, every custodian, most of the major market makers and trading firms, the leading apps that are deployed on other protocols, most of those all launching day one. Basically, this is lit up and is available and is already integrated into almost every platform that is out there. So that is tremendous. I think, in terms of total value on the network, I think we're already approaching $1 billion of value on the network.

That's one of the fastest deployments of capital into a network in the history of blockchain launches. Now, day one, week one is still incredibly early. The right way to think about this is like when a new operating system launches, do you have great apps? Do you have good developers? Are the developers building apps? Are those apps getting traction? Are there repeat users? In an ecosystem like this, what you need to be focused on is transaction volume growing? Is the value of assets deployed on the network growing? Is usage and liquidity and in capital markets functions growing? Those are really the critical things, and the team is very focused on seeing those things be realized in the coming weeks and months.

A couple of things. I think the first is, the way we look at our business is as a kind of comprehensive full stack platform. Each of the pillars, the operating system pillar, the digital asset pillar, which is anchored in USDC, and the payments pillar, they have their own internal network effects and flywheels. They also have flywheels that roll against each other. ARC adoption drives USDC adoption, as an example. When we think about monetization, and we think about traction, we look at this across the influence that these have across the board. Each one needs to obviously have a stand on its own. Let me talk about that with respect to Arc. I think the first is Arc today, the most recent fully diluted value on the network was $3 billion.

Obviously, we believe that this is a network that has the potential to be valued much, much higher. Circle is a 25% stakeholder in that, and that stake will generate economic rewards to Circle based on the activity on the network. That is really key, which is basically, think of it as if you were able to have a stake in the revenue of Amazon Web Services, what would that be worth? As more people build applications and deploy applications onto a cloud or something like this, the more applications that are deployed, the more traffic, the more usage, the more underlying demand on the volume, the more that generates value for the stake itself. It would be like owning a piece of Amazon Web Services and the transactional revenue stream. In the first week of Arc network generated about a half a million dollars of transaction fees in USDC.

Obviously, that is all public. You can see it in real-time. There is a burst at the launch, but we will see how that sustains over time. Circle, obviously as one of the largest operators, receives those fees. Those fees will ultimately accrue also to ARC token over time and the company stake in that as well. Fee revenue is one and very significant. Staking rewards is another when the network moves to Proof of Stake. Secondarily, if you look at what we have launched with Arc, there is the actual kind of core network, operating system infrastructure, and then there is layers of other kits and protocols and services that we have built on top of it. Those themselves also have monetization in them, fee-based monetization in them. The kind of layers of services that we also provide all provide incremental fee-based monetization opportunities for us.

The question about what value comes from a BlackRock or a Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation or other companies launching things like tokenized commodities, equities, other things, really the important thing there is twofold. I think one is all of these securities as they come on chain, the purchasing and subscription and redemption and trading is all going to be done in USDC. It intrinsically drives demand for USDC. You see that today where on different venues that are offering tokenized instruments for trading, USDC is the dominant currency that is being used there. What do you have to believe? You have to believe that tokenization grows, regulated tokenized instruments grow. As those grow, that drives fundamental demand for digital cash, for subscription, redemption, trading, collateral, et cetera. These are just fundamentally demand drivers on USDC as well.

I think the second is that it's also just very, very valuable. As these tokenized instruments come on chain, we can help drive and create interest rate markets, lending markets, credit markets on these instruments as well, which also then effectively the borrowed demand creates liquid demand for USDC as well. The maturation of, it's sort of like securities lending, but essentially the maturation and marrying of tokenized securities with on-chain lending markets is an enormous opportunity, and that's historically been a major growth driver for USDC, which is basically USDC has an enormous amount of demand as the borrowed asset for people in the on-chain economy, and we expect that to be an important driver as well.