Circle is known to many as the issuer of the $74 billion digital currency USD Coin, or USDC. But co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire believes the company’s latest launch may be the “most consequential major platform launch” in its history. Allaire likens the Arc blockchain and full-stack platform, launched on Sept. 16, to an Android operating system for the global economy, facilitating payments, lending, trading, and even, one day, commerce between AI agents.
The platform has more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders including global banks, asset management firms, payment networks, exchanges, and AI platforms. Its founding validators include BlackRock, Standard Chartered, Mastercard, Visa and Intercontinental Exchange. Allaire, who co-founded Circle 13 years ago, is a serial entrepreneur.
Before his work on stablecoins, he founded cloud-based online video platform Brightcove, and before that, software company Allaire Corporation with his brother, which was acquired by Macromedia in the early aughts. He spoke with TIME in June, ahead of the launch of Arc. How are you thinking about the different regulatory environments in all the markets that you're operating in?
Blockchain networks are just technology services. They're soft, open software protocols that run on the internet. They're general purpose computers, and so general purpose computers and network protocols are themselves not regulated activities.
It's what people do on top of it. It's a little bit like the internet itself. The internet is unregulated, but the activities on the internet become regulated, whether it's privacy, data, or financial activity.
But one of the biggest challenges of actually [having] what we think of as the core of the financial system run on public internet infrastructure like this, has been that the major regulators have had concerns about [whether] this infrastructure [is] too decentralized, where it's a bunch of unknown actors and therefore, even though it's meant to be trustless, it's sort of not trustworthy, or you could have the commingling of bad actors and good actors. The other is slightly more technical, but important, which is: central banks, for example, care about that. When a transaction happens, it's a final transaction, and the way a lot of these networks have worked in the past is there's what’s called probabilistic finality.
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