Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire and Chris Dixon on Arc, Stablecoins, and the Emerging Machine Economy

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire and Chris Dixon on Arc, Stablecoins, and the Emerging Machine Economy In a discussion with Robert Hackett and Chris Dixon, Circle cofounder and CEO Jeremy Allaire outlined the rationale behind launching the Arc blockchain, designed to meet institutional compliance standards and support an internet-scale economy increasingly dominated by AI agents. Circle launched Arc to provide an institutional-grade, credibly neutral blockchain operating system tailored for real-world assets and AI agents. USDC and Circle benefit from liquidity network effects and the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), which will now support other assets issued on Arc. Chris Dixon argued that open-source technology and blockchains act as an antidote to the centralizing tendencies of AI. Both Allaire and Dixon anticipate that future economic transactions will largely be executed directly by AI machines. Arc and Institutional Infrastructure Circle decided to build Arc after institutions and regulators indicated that existing networks lacked the compliance, security, and operational standards required for mainstream finance. Arc requires node operators to satisfy rigorous operational and information security benchmarks, facilitating deterministic settlement finality within fractions of a second. To attain global scale, Circle aims for geopolitical neutrality and diverse governance across international financial institutions and geographic blocs. Network Moats and CCTP Integration Allaire noted that USDC's defensibility stems from high primary and secondary market liquidity—minting and redeeming $150 billion quarterly—alongside regulated infrastructure globally. While CCTP has served as Circle's highway for USDC transfers across chains, Arc enables third-party asset issuers to leverage CCTP's interoperability and liquidity for tokenized equities, stablecoins, and credit instruments. The Machine Economy and Blockchains The conversation highlighted AI agents as prospective primary users and deployers of software on blockchains. Early experiments on Arc range from autonomous biological simulations to decentralized dispute resolution for AI-to-AI hiring contracts. Dixon stressed that open-access blockchains can counteract AI's centralizing tendencies by maintaining a level playing field, predicting that machines will eventually comprise the majority of internet economic actors.

Circle首席执行官解析新公链Arc与未来机器经济 Circle联合创始人兼CEO Jeremy Allaire与a16z crypto管理合伙人Chris Dixon探讨了Circle推出公链Arc的动因，分析了稳定币的流动性护城河，并展望了由人工智能驱动的未来机器经济与链上金融基础设施的演变。 Circle推出新公链Arc以满足央行与金融机构的合规监管标准，并针对AI将成为链上主要用户与软件部署者的趋势进行底层设计。 Circle依托每季度1500亿美元的USDC铸造赎回流动性与跨链协议CCTP构建护城河，Arc链上资产可直接接入CCTP实现跨网络流动。 区块链作为开放服务能够抗衡AI带来的中心化趋势，未来AI间的自主交易与信贷协作将重塑数字经济形态。 Arc公链的建立背景与制度定位 Circle在推动USDC主流化过程中发现，现有区块链网络无法满足传统金融机构对信息安全、合规与运营标准的严格要求。为了让全球央行与金融机构接纳链上真实资产与投资合约，Circle开发了Arc公链，要求验证节点符合严格的SLA标准以实现确定性的即时结算。此外，Circle预见未来区块链的核心使用者、交易者和代码部署者将主要是AI，因此Arc在底层设计上直接面向智能体经济。 流动性网络效应与CCTP互操作通道 Circle目前每季度进行约1500亿美元的USDC铸造和赎回，并在全球银行系统与主流交易平台积累了深厚的流动性。其跨链传输协议（CCTP）作为业内使用最广泛的互操作协议，过去主要承载USDC。随着Arc推出，在其上发行的代币化股票、信贷产品等均可使用CCTP作为有效载荷，实现与现有跨链流动性通道的直接打通。 AI机器经济与抗中心化趋势 业内观察认为，互联网上的主要参与者正在转变为机器，未来将涌现出新型信贷市场（运作方式更接近AdWords竞价而非传统债券打包）以及AI雇佣AI的链上仲裁机制。针对AI可能引发的大资本与资源集中化趋势，开源性质的区块链被视作一种制衡手段，能为开发者和自主运行的AI智能体提供公平、低费率且开放的全球协作平台。

Issuer of USDC Circle set out to put dollars on the internet and make them work everywhere. After more than a decade working on that problem, cofounder and CEO Jeremy Allaire is thinking about what happens when the users are increasingly AI. He joins Chris Dixon and Robert Hackett to talk through the underpinnings of a new machine economy – and how credit, commerce, and global financial infrastructure could feel its impact. Highlights: [01:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=118s) Circle’s original vision for programmable money [07:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=439s) Why institutions started taking stablecoins seriously [12:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=724s&pp=0gcJCWMAwfN6Pr3D) Learnings from building a global financial network [15:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=903s) What gives a stablecoin its moat? [26:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=1588s) Crypto’s growing adoption in the shadow of AI [28:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=1691s) From making existing things better to creating entirely new markets [32:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=1979s) The weirdest experiments being built on Arc [37:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=2222s) What happens when AI hires AI [38:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=2284s) Why the next big thing starts out looking like a toy [39:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=2345s) Can blockchains counter AI’s centralizing tendencies? [44:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3TBOld3r3c&t=2641s) What the machine economy could look like in five years *Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.* **Robert Hackett:** Why does the world need another blockchain? What is missing from the infrastructure we already have, and what’s made possible by launching a new one? Joining me are Jeremy Allaire, cofounder and CEO of Circle, which just brought a chain of its own to mainnet called Arc, and Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner of a16z crypto. Jeremy, you and I go back to my days as a journalist at *Fortune*. I’ve covered Circle through many of its iterations, its journey from the Bitcoin consumer business to Circle Pay, the Venmo-like product. You had a trading business, bought an exchange. Ultimately, you guys struck gold with one of the world’s most dominant stablecoins today, USDC, and now you’re following that up with Arc. Tell me, what did you learn along the way that made you say you need to build your own blockchain? The idea was to build a protocol for dollars on the internet, like an HTTP for money. – Jeremy Allaire **Jeremy Allaire:** It goes back to when we started Circle. In late 2012, 2013, the thing that drew me to this whole space was this idea of programmable money and this idea of these networks becoming computers that you could run applications on. The idea was to build a protocol for dollars on the internet, like an HTTP for money. To do that, you needed computer networks that let you build these higher-level protocols, then scale them and make them user-friendly. Our philosophy really became, well, let’s just make sure that digital dollars that we make and the protocols that support them run everywhere. We wanted USDC to be like Spotify or Netflix. You just buy a device, you know it works. We want to make sure that if you have a blockchain, these digital dollars work, and you can integrate them. Then we built the interoperability layer to connect it all so that you can safely move them around. With stablecoins, people were like, “Oh wow, that seems to solve a problem for moving money. I could actually start to move money better with this.” That’s when we really started to see growth in non-speculative uses. Then regulators actually started to look at this and say, “Hey, if the world’s financial institutions are going to connect to blockchains, we expect certain things from those blockchains. We expect them to meet certain standards.” When we heard that, we started meeting with more of these institutions who are interested in stablecoins and the applications of stablecoins. What we found was that there weren’t blockchain networks that were purpose-built for what we saw as this new, mainstream era. It became very clear that the primary users, the primary deployers of software, and the primary entities that were going to be running on this were going to very likely be AI. – Jeremy Allaire So we took the decision to build a new operating system and a new network with Arc, where the infrastructure can actually be held to standards that would allow the world’s central banks to say, “Yeah, you’re good to go with putting real money and real investment contracts on this thing.” We’ve tried to bring all of this together in a network owned by a really broad set of stakeholders, ultimately the users on the network as well. But then it became very clear that the primary users, the primary deployers of software, and the primary entities that were going to be running on this were going to very likely be AI. So we started to think about a lot of the issues that go into that, and we continue to as well. A very central set of design features for what we’re doing is the shift to this agentic economy — anyway, that’s the backdrop. **RH:** Chris, you’ve seen a lot of pitches for new blockchains. What convinced you that there’s room for yet another? **Chris Dixon:** The most important thing when we make an investment is the team Jeremy’s built. I also share his vision, I guess. I’ve written and talked about this extensively, but this is a new type of computer — a global finance computer that has all sorts of platform possibilities, new applications, and so forth. I also think, and maybe Jeremy can talk about this, he has an unusually deep view on the regulatory side and on the international side. Money has the most obvious network effect. USDC is extremely popular. Dollars are extremely popular around the world. I think we have an opportunity to have a system like Arc become a global money layer. Jeremy, I would love to hear from you about the international angle, particularly with all the complexity of the different governments and regulatory bodies. **JA:** Obviously, one of the things that’s a little bit different about Arc is that in order to operate the infrastructure of the network and to run ultimately what will be like staking validation nodes on the network, you actually have to meet high standards for operations, information security, compliance, and other areas. Knowing that the people doing that are meeting and upholding those standards, and have service-level agreements and other things, is part of what allows the network to deliver what we call deterministic settlement finality in a fraction of a second. That’s actually very, very important with real money. But the other thing is that we’re thinking about an economic operating system that runs on the internet and can support the full vernacular of economic activity. That goes way beyond payments: every kind of financial contract and economic contract, governance decisions, all of this. If you want that to be something that’s internet scale, it has to have geoeconomic and geopolitical diversity. It actually needs to be something that is credibly neutral vis-à-vis the stakeholders that run the infrastructure and that ultimately govern the infrastructure. That’s one of the covenants that we’ve made. There are quite a few of the largest global players in capital markets, in asset management, in payments, as well as many global banks that cover huge amounts of international markets, Asian markets, European markets, US markets. We’ve started, and this is really just the very beginning, by trying to get this very diverse set of infrastructure stakeholders. I think we would like to see that go much further. We’d like to see every major geoeconomic bloc in the world running the infrastructure, having a significant economic stake in the infrastructure, having their local champions in their markets using the infrastructure, and that’s critical. If you don’t have that, it’s gonna be very hard to get internet scale. Blockchain networks and distributed governance and all these things give us some really interesting tools for that, and so that’s a big motivation. Again, we’re early in that. **RH:** Jeremy, how are you thinking about your moat and the points of defensibility that you have? The most widely used interoperability protocol in the world right now on all blockchain networks across all assets is Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, CCTP. And that protocol is the most widely used because USDC is the most transferred digital currency across these networks. – Jeremy Allaire **JA:** There’s the stablecoin network, which is our USDC and also our euro stablecoin and other digital assets that we issue. We have a tokenized Bitcoin product. We have the largest, I believe, currently, tokenized treasury and money market product. And so there’s a whole family there. But USDC is obviously the central actor in that group. The more applications connected to the network, the more utility it has. So the next developer comes along and says, “Hey, what network am I going to support? Oh, I should support this because everyone else supports it.” You have this really powerful utility flywheel. So we mint and redeem $150 billion a quarter of this, and it’s plugged into all of these banking systems globally. And that liquidity that exists on a primary basis, on a secondary basis, in onchain markets and onchain protocols, that’s very powerful. The fact that Binance and Coinbase and Hyperliquid, just as a few examples, have such deep fundamental liquidity on it means that its capital efficiency is greater, and therefore other products that need the most efficient capital benefit from that as well. So you have utility network effects, and you have liquidity network effects, and then you also have what I’ll broadly call infrastructure moats, which is to say we’ve built regulated infrastructure in all these parts of the world, which is non-trivial. And then there’s actual interoperability infrastructure. So the most widely used interoperability protocol in the world right now on all blockchain networks across all assets is Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, CCTP. And that protocol is the most widely used because USDC is the most transferred digital currency across these networks. One of the big things that we’ve done with Arc is if you issue an asset on Arc, a tokenized equity or a stablecoin or a tokenized credit product or whatever it is, your asset actually becomes eligible to run on the payload of CCTP. And so in a sense, we built the highways to move value around all these networks, and the only car that could drive on the highway was USDC, until now. Now, if you’re an asset issuer, you can ride those same highways and get that interoperability, liquidity distribution that flows. And I think what we like to say is the stablecoin market is a winner-take-most market structure, not a winner-take-all market structure. As this goes from several hundred billion to hopefully several trillion, there are going to be multiple networks. But with Arc, I’d come back to where I started: We think we’re going into a new chapter in this space. When I look at blockchain networks, my mental model is these are operating systems. They attract developers. They attract assets. They’re economic operating systems. And so my view is this is a wide-open space. No one has won significant developer mindshare. The number of active developers on any of these networks is incredibly small when you think about developer activations in traditional platforms — it’s super early. And so I guess my point is that no one has a moat. Something else to consider is that the primary actors in all of this are going to be AI creating software. Maybe there are people behind the AI creating software, but it’ll also be AI creating its own software. And it’s going to be AI intermediating and interacting and performing economic work. The really exciting part of these waves is when developers start to get creative. – Chris Dixon **CD:** I think there’s this 10- to 20-year period where you’re going to reconfigure the digital economic landscape, and that’s dovetailing, I think timing-wise, very nicely with the rise of highly performant blockchains like Arc. I like this framing of skeuomorphic and native. At first, when you have a breakthrough technology, you see people taking existing use cases, like trading and payments and things and human payments, and putting them on the platform. But over time, to me, the really exciting part of these waves is when developers start to get creative. So I don’t know when that will happen. I expect a couple of years. **JA:** I totally agree with that. And I like to say, you want to create something where developers and entrepreneurs can just go do stuff. I use the example of credit. I think the combination of these new blockchain network operating systems, this new base layer of fully reserved digital dollar money, and AI is going to allow us to create completely new types of credit instruments, with people and machines that supply and demand money. These credit marketplaces will probably look more like AdWords than like someone who packages up a bunch of credit and sells it as a bond. So you’re going to end up with really, really different market structures, unit economics, distribution models, and reach. And we’re getting early views into this, which is tokenization of RWAs opening up equities to more people, who can do more with those equities. **RH:** Jeremy, what’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen people build on Arc at this point? **JA:** I just saw this in the last couple days. There’s this thing called Fly Brain. I don’t know who the team is. They basically took all of this neurological information about the brains of flies, the real actual computational rules of fly brains. They basically converted it into 16 megabytes of bytecode that runs on Arc. They clearly used AI to create a user experience layer where the fly brains, they’ve been set loose, and they are actually evolving and engaging and interacting in this environment. I haven’t looked at the token incentives, so I don’t know what the deal is. I literally was like, “What is this?” I wrote on Twitter, “What is this for?!” And then there are these long explanations of what this could mean for scientific discovery. And maybe it’s just a scam. But it’s indicative of what happens when AI is combined with these computer networks and economics: people are starting to try really different things. **RH:** Fly Brain network on Arc, giving a whole new meaning to swarms of agents. **JA:** I’ll give you another example of a project coming to Arc, which is essentially arbitration for the work of AI. And that scales from AI jurors or AI arbitrators up into human arbitrators, and it has a security and staking model attached to it. But it’s designed to basically deal with the fact that AI will hire other AI, and humans will hire other AI for work, and you need arbitration. And you need mechanisms for the money and the release of money around that. Blockchains in some ways can be an antidote to what I believe is a centralizing tendency of AI. – Chris Dixon **RH:** Chris, you wrote *Read Write Own* a couple years ago. And at that time, the AI stuff was very nascent. It was only just getting underway. How has your thinking about the future changed? **CD:** Well, I actually talked about AI a lot in the book and had it as one of the core areas. Part of my argument was that blockchains in some ways can be an antidote to what I believe is a centralizing tendency of AI. I think AI is amazing. I love AI, but there is this potential effect where companies with the most capital and other resources can have an advantage. And so that’s part of the policy argument we make too. Well, one, open source is very important to counter that. Open source has been the most democratizing trend in the history of technology, if you look at things like Linux. And then blockchains are like open source — they’re open services. They provide a kind of level playing field, and low fees, global access, and so forth for all sorts of developers. **RH:** Paint a picture for me five years from now. What has changed about the global financial system as a result of the convergence of these new technologies? **JA:** The honest answer is no one has any idea at this point. Because, in my view, the pace of technology acceleration is faster than at any point in human history. But what I do think is over the coming years, we’re going to go through a shift towards just an extraordinary amount of the work that happens, the creative work and the cognitive work and all the economic substance and exchange, where that is primarily operated by these AI machines. And so how does that translate? I think it goes hand in hand with the machine economy and this infrastructure, and it should be a world where the creative output of the economy is significantly larger than it is today. The volume of products and services and other things that are available, broadly distributed around the world, should be orders of magnitude larger as well. And so that’s what I think things look like in five years. It's very plausible that the vast majority of internet participants will be machines. – Chris Dixon **RH:** It’s a compelling vision. Chris, I’ve heard you use this phrase “machine age networks” too to describe what’s coming. **CD:** As Jeremy said very eloquently, I think some of this will be very hard to kind of imagine, but it’s pretty clear where we’re headed based on a lot of these trends. And I think, to Jeremy’s point, it’s very plausible that the vast majority of internet participants will be machines, and it seems natural that those machines would have economic components to what they do.