How AI Agents Will Transform the Financial System with Circle Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire

Today on No Prior, we have Jeremy Olair, the co-founder and CEO of Circle. We'll

be talking about cryptocurrency, AI, agentic payments, AI evolving on the blockchain, and a variety of other topics. Great. Well, thank you so much

topics. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you.

It's great to be here. Thank you. So

maybe we can start with you just giving a quick overview of Circle, what you do, how you approach the world because I think we're going to be talking a lot about stable coins, crypto, AI, and how all these things tie into sort of the agentic future. But I'd love to just

agentic future. But I'd love to just start with sort of origins of the company, what you all are up to, and we can go from there.

Yeah, for sure. So um yeah, Circle's been around for a while. Uh I co-ounded the company uh over, yeah, 13 years ago or so, 2013. And um you know really at

at inception I was really excited about this idea that we could create a protocol for dollars on the internet and I had been really excited about uh what was happening with technologies like

Bitcoin. um and uh had been you know

Bitcoin. um and uh had been you know working on kind of internet infrastructure for a long time and got really excited like if we had like a protocol for dollars on the internet um that you know potentially we could have

a way to store and move value you know instantly globally frictionlessly at at no cost ultimately. Um the other idea that we were really excited about back

then was this idea of programmable money and the idea that um eventually these these networks blockchains would become like operating systems and you could actually have machines that intermediate

economic activity and financial activity on the internet and including like autonomous software machines and um back then we didn't have generative AI or anything like that but this sort of idea

of kind of commoditizing the kind of payment utility layer um with like very safe digital dollar digital currencies and then having like programmability of that with machines that are kind of

tamper resistant can run on the internet. That's what kind of drove the

internet. That's what kind of drove the founding of the company and and the view was like if we could do that like we could actually improve the financial system make it safer make it more accessible um make it more efficient um

and and kind of derive new utility for money that we haven't had before. And so

that was sort of where why is the dollar aspect of that important? So if you look at a lot of

important? So if you look at a lot of the things that happened in cryptocurrency in the early days, it was really about creating things that were divorced from the traditional financial system if possible or were not dollar-centric. So for example, Bitcoin

dollar-centric. So for example, Bitcoin was in part a response to the great financial crisis. Yeah. And the view

financial crisis. Yeah. And the view that all sorts of weird bailouts happened there and therefore we needed some alternative sort of financial infrastructure for the world.

Yeah. So I think um so I actually it's what's very interesting is like I I I had you know I believe in kind of Austrian economic thought. uh I was you know studying uh Austrian economic

thought like in the early 1990s uh for for a very long time. Um and so I've been interested in sound money theory and actually it was studying the the kind of impact of the global financial

crisis that that drew me into this because my view is like there has to be a way to build like a safer uh financial system. And the key issue there was um I was interested in this

idea of full reserve money. And in some ways, Bitcoin is full reserve money because you you you know, you you kind of there is no way to fractionally lend Bitcoin, per se.

Full reserve money means currency that's backed by something hard behind it, some asset.

Doesn't necessarily mean it's a hard hard back. Full reserve money is

hard back. Full reserve money is different than say fractional full reserve banking, I should say, is different than fractional reserve banking. And so,

banking. And so, um you know, back in in there was another uh major uh economic collapse which was the Great Depression, the run on all the banks and all that fun. And

in the 1930s there was a really big debate about like what's the right construct for the banking system and the financial system and um there was a a proposal from a group of economists uh

called the Chicago plan and uh the kind of ring leader was a Chicago economist actually it might have been a Yale economist or Princeton at the time but uh Irving Fischer who wrote a a book called 100% money

and that idea was that full reserve money was essentially um you know government obligation money. It's so

it's still the obligation of the government like the US government in that instance. Um but that essentially

that instance. Um but that essentially um you can have that and you can hold that but you can't take that and then um uh fractionally lend against it. So you

have kind of a full reserve but you can only lend full reserve money. And so

that um was a a big proposal for how to structure the the way the financial system worked. And it was actually um

system worked. And it was actually um lobbied very very hard uh against it by the banks and the banks really liked fractional reserve. They liked to be

fractional reserve. They liked to be able to have the inherent kind of leverage and risk-taking and instead convinced the government to establish or they collectively with the government

sanction established a a insurance company uh called the Federal Depository Insurance Company Corporation. Um and so that was a kind of corporate uh insurance model, but the risk-taking

still existed. And so we've continued to

still existed. And so we've continued to kind of face those issues. The great

financial crisis was an example of 30x leverage, 12x leverage, 14x leverage against against these sort of base layer. And so my philosophy has been

layer. And so my philosophy has been well um right now in terms of general utility um our our existing uh economic system like it it does depend on um

really major reserve currencies like the dollar. And my view is like that's going

dollar. And my view is like that's going to continue for a while. Uh maybe 30, 40, 50 years. It'll continue for a while. But what we want to do is

while. But what we want to do is construct a system that is in fact safer. So a full reserve form of money.

safer. So a full reserve form of money.

And that's what stable coins are. That's

what dollar stable coins are. And in

fact with the Genius Act that passed last year, it's sort of codified in law.

Like you can't do anything with this.

It's like this very narrowly bound narrow money kind of model. And so I think in some ways like that original vision we've now got established in laws around the world. Um and and now we have

to do more with it. We have to make it extraordinarily useful. We need you can

extraordinarily useful. We need you can you can lend that form of money as well.

But it's just that you can't do fractional reserve.

So what what what are stable coins uh currently backed by? My understanding is for example there uh the stable coin companies are big buyers of treasuries uh or US treasuries and other sort of instruments like that. Could you explain a bit more sort of what tends to back

these things?

Yeah. So, um, up up up until really the last couple of years, um, you know, stable stable coins like USDC were were, um, had to be always one for one

redeemable against, um, you know, very safe liquid assets. Uh, and we couldn't take risk outside of what was permitted under the kind of payment system laws that regulated us. And so that was

circle. There are other people who

circle. There are other people who didn't take that approach. uh um and you know but you know sort of fiat stable coins in this way were back that way.

Now laws have now come into play in major jurisdictions whether it's in Europe or Japan or the US um etc. and we've been following the whatever laws apply to us, you know, whenever they

apply to us obviously. But um what that's really led to is an architecture which is basically what's now federal law which is um really holding only

short duration US government treasuries um or uh treasury collateral that is overnight with with like global banks.

Uh so that's you know very safe overnight treasury collateral for cash.

uh and then you know some amount in cash that is for kind of immediate liquidity um but in that case it's sort of holding it in these sort of big custodial institutions like bank of New York that

holds hundreds of trillions of dollars etc so of assets and so um that is essentially the architecture of USDC and and we're very transparent we have daily transparency onto most of it through a

system we set up with black rockck but um so USDC is like a crypto token that anybody can effectively purchase And in exchange for $1, you'd get one USDC. And

that USDC continues to be backed by a government treasury, like a short-term T- bell or some cash or some.

That's right. It's it's backed by treasuries, repos, and and and short duration T bills. The average duration tends to be of like the of the T bills and and that portfolio tends to be

around like 13 days. So, it's super super liquid and kind of it sort of allows it to be treated as like a cash instrument. What do people do with it?

instrument. What do people do with it?

What are the main use cases of USDC? The

the conception of this obviously is like a general protocol for dollars on the internet and in fact the whole design is this is like a general purpose general architecture money and we actually see

it used you know from at the very smallest end like someone who's paying you know 25 cents for a digital object in a digital game that's built on a blockchain that would be like one end or

even now we're starting to see and we'll come back to this topic I'm sure you know AI agents that are paying for uh the output of essentially the AI tokens

of another AI agent and they're you know spending again just you know uh a dollar 50 cents 20 cents etc. So super tiny transactions at one end all the way to

the largest electronic trading firms in the world that do huge amounts of of capital markets activity who are you know settling multiund million dollar transactions and the powerful thing is

it's all the same just like you know if I send you an email uh you know the and my emails like hey this is what I had for breakfast the payload of that is the same as if I sent you an email that had

like a CIA dossier attached to it like USDC doesn't care you know so as a as a general architecture. It can be used

general architecture. It can be used across a huge range of things and we have everything from merchants in Stripe and Shopify that are using it to Visa actually using it themselves to actually move money on their own internal network

instead of using the legacy banking system to lots and lots of kind of neo banks remittance companies that are using it as a way to move value. You

know, a great uh uh kind of B2B uh uh fintech uh ramp just yesterday launched you know USDC as like core to their treasury system. You can use it to pay

treasury system. You can use it to pay invoices, pay anywhere.

My sense is some of the reasons people do this is number one um you can do it at any time. So for example, if I send a wire, I know a lot of crypto companies for example that when they raise money, they ask you to send USDC because

instead of hitting a wiring deadline in the afternoon, you can wire them money on the weekend. You can send money anytime.

It just works the way the internet works, right? I mean, our expectation is

works, right? I mean, our expectation is like I can pick up, you know, my WhatsApp or I can pick up my WeChat and I can just communicate in video with anyone anywhere and it just works, right? And my expectation is like, hey,

right? And my expectation is like, hey, if I make a piece of software like and I put it on the internet, like billions of people can access it. I don't need to do something special. And and and I think

something special. And and and I think that's, you know, basically this is just internet native and it runs on internet protocols. And so it behaves the way

protocols. And so it behaves the way that any piece of data or content or behaves on the internet, which is what our expectations are, you know, most people's expectations are.

Yeah. I was just trying to uh enumerate a little bit of like what makes it a superior instrument for all sorts of purposes. And one is 24/7 accessibility.

purposes. And one is 24/7 accessibility.

two maybe some form of transaction fees relative to the volume and then three is um my sense is it's also a way for people to participate in US dollars who often would not have access directly and

so they use crypto as almost a proxy to yeah for sure I mean I I think um store of value is a really big thing and we see that and and in fact like the the law that was passed last year the Genius

Act like a big motivation for the administration and this something that we've been proposing and and kind of pushing for a long time is that this is a way to um continue to export the

dollar and so we're now exporting digital dollars and we're doing that all around the world and that's like strategically important uh to the United States and and from a geopolitical geoeconomic perspective. Um but you know

geoeconomic perspective. Um but you know there's other things too which is this comes from my own background uh as well which is these are this is programmable money. Um there's never been

money. Um there's never been programmable money like you actually have essentially like our stablecoin network is just a public API on the public internet that anyone can plug

into and use. And so if I'm a developer and I want like global dollar settlement and I want to provide that as a capability to my users I don't have to ask permission. I can just go connect to

ask permission. I can just go connect to that smart contract, connect to that uh public API and boom, I have now an application with global digital dollar utility. And so that's really different.

Yeah. And smart contracts is basically a way to write code that's wrapped around this money that allows you to effectively have a virtual contract online. So you

can say under XYZ conditions, pay this out. We're going to generate a financial

out. We're going to generate a financial instrument off of this. And it's just kind of based on this other layer that you can plug into effectively.

Yeah, that is definitely the case. And I

think like um yeah, you know, the the idea of programmable money was like again this early idea that we had and smart contracts um was sort of the original expression. But when I looked

original expression. But when I looked at that 13 years ago, my view was that blockchain networks are operating systems. They're going to be operating systems. And so when we think about operating systems, we have lots of

paradigms for that. We have mobile operating systems. The web was itself kind of an operating system with a runtime and a language model and an object model. And you know clouds became

object model. And you know clouds became kind of like these big virtual operating system environments. AI foundation

system environments. AI foundation models are now essentially operating systems that execute tasks and and other things. Blockchains are operating

things. Blockchains are operating systems and they have compute engines.

They have virtual machines and you can write turning complete code. You can

write software that runs on these. But

there's some really key attributes that make them different. So the the first is that the code is is sort of tamper resistant. it once it's published it's

resistant. it once it's published it's sort of like out as like a machine that's tamper resistant. The second is it's perfectly auditable. You can audit every single input and output of that machine of that code in real time

because it's all on a public blockchain so anybody in the world can look up. So

it's like all the compute is public accessible. It's open source by nature

accessible. It's open source by nature and um and and that's really powerful as well. And um and you know it also has

well. And um and you know it also has these sort of um uh essentially um kind of transaction and compute integrity asurances and this is really key and it

ties back to AI as well which is like you want asurances that the machine is doing what it said it's going to do and you want kind of the inputs and outputs to be provable to and the state of the machine to be provable and these are

these these are things that um it it was not easy to do uh in the past and so these these network computers um these operating systems now provide for that

and as we're moving into the AIdriven economic system right having those mechanisms becomes even more important it happened to be important for financial transactions where you know

integrity proof audibility verifiability are like intrinsic in a fiduciary apparatus that was like really key but now when we're dealing with uh you know

kind of autonomous uh actions in the economy that also becomes extremely important it would be great to talk about that because you know uh gez probably seven eight years ago me and my friends used

to speculate that the most likely place maybe the AGI would emerge which again I don't think is going to be the case in the future would be off of the blockchain because you had these effectively a uh agents or very simple

agents even running back then in some sense in terms of doing transactions on the blockchain and you had these economic games that were multi-turn economic games to some extent that these actors could play and so we said isn't that a great place to basically evolve

intelligence right because you have these multi-turn games you have economic incentives, you have game theory, you learn all sorts of lessons off of that.

Obviously, there's a very different world now with sort of generative AI and foundation models, but I'd love to hear your view of where is uh where are agentic payments going?

Yeah.

And is it going to be crypto? Is it

going to be more just traditional banking systems? Is it a hybrid? Like

banking systems? Is it a hybrid? Like

what do you think are the drivers of that?

I mean, there's there's a lot in there.

There's a lot we could talk about. Um so

so maybe first like I think um you know my my own view is that uh you know we're going we're going through a pretty steep kind of curve right now. We're like in

in the you know about 3 months into a pretty dramatic uh shift in kind of the fundamental capabilities of technology.

Um probably the most dramatic that I've ever seen in my own time in in technology. And I think um you know that

technology. And I think um you know that shift is is effectively going to mean that um a couple things in my view. So

the first is that um more and more of the actual work that is done in the real economy um especially in uh in in you know kind of the what we call the white

collar economy but but in in many many areas of service and delivery and and and so on like so much of that is going to be conducted by AI agents and so AI

agents conducting the work AI agents collaborating with each other AI agents you know consuming services from each other and and kind of you know purchasing effectively specialized

intelligence or output etc. Like this is we're on a really interesting curve there and so the kind of agentic economy is being born as we speak and in that world um we need a different

infrastructure for the financial intermediation layer.

Why?

Um well we don't have an infrastructure that can support that. We don't have an infrastructure that can um work globally interoperably instantly that can be uh

uh programmed uh through software layers by arbitrary pieces of software that doesn't exist. We need an infrastructure

doesn't exist. We need an infrastructure where the agents themselves can uh dynamically create and spin up uh different kind of uh uh financial endpoints themselves. We need

endpoints themselves. We need transactions that can scale potentially into the you know you know billions or trillions of transactions. We don't have that. Uh we also need um we need the

that. Uh we also need um we need the ability to kind of um handle transactions at micro scale as well. So

uh you know for example consuming uh a certain amount of intelligence might be 5 cents or 10 cents as it is with these.

And so we need we need that to work. We

need that to work in real time again between any piece of hardware software anywhere in the world. Isn't it all that though stuff that people have been talking about for a long time in terms of just crypto like the benefits? It

hasn't really become possible until really just the last couple of years. So

you it really took kind of third generation blockchains to actually deliver on this. So now today like um you know you actually can look at like transaction volumes of USDC which is by

far the most transacted digital currency in the world way more than anything else and um transaction volumes have grown incredibly and um off of like a a monetary base that's also growing but

the transaction volumes are growing way faster and that's because money velocity has picked up. the the cost to transact is now subsent uh reliably and so when you take out the cost you can do more

transactions and so with ARC which we can come back to you know we we now have an infrastructure where we can conduct transactions for a millionth of a penny uh which just was never feasible before so yeah tell us more about ARC because I

know you folks are rolling this out as your own blockchain etc I would just love to learn more about what it is what are the use cases what differentiates it um I I would love I would love to talk about that I want to finish one other

thought on this sort uh the the sort of agentic piece which is I think um uh in addition to the sort of like financial infrastructure that's needed in in this world and and and the role that will

play and it ties back to your your actual kind of question and stuff that you were thinking about before is um my own view is that uh you know a agents um and and you know seeing what happened

with openclaw and moltbook and all this stuff is all really interesting because it showed that you could actually see emergent forms of of cooperation of of

interaction of of uh of of engagement amongst AIs. Uh and that's pretty

amongst AIs. Uh and that's pretty powerful and clearly like we're at the front edge of that. Like there's going to be a lot more of that. And so um if you have AI agents that are from around

the world, they could be generated from lots of different models and LLMs and the like. Um and and they need to kind

the like. Um and and they need to kind of coordinate. They need a medium a

of coordinate. They need a medium a trust a trust a trustworthy medium where they can do that where they can instantiate an entity where they can store value in that entity. they can

execute and arrange contracts uh that intermediate the work and the tasks and that where all of it is real time mathematically uh and computationally provable and so blockchain

infrastructure now actually gives us the building blocks for when I say agentic economic activity most people think oh that's e-commerce or payment that's not agentic economic activity is actually

how does the organization of of what we used to talk think of as labor and capital but essenti like kind of how does this organization of kind of compute work uh happen and and what

kinds of kind of corporate forms might emerge uh in in that world to do that.

So I I'm actually quite interested in that. that does tie to ARC because

that. that does tie to ARC because that's a a design surface that we care about which is basically um we we describe ARC as an economic operating

system and this goes back to a comment I made earlier which is these networks are operating systems and um we're we're moving now from the kind of like early adopter era which you're very familiar

with which was mostly around like you know speculation on different things there were some interesting things like NFTTS or whatever but like we're now moving very squarely because of stable

coins into like the real economic activity side of this. And um and and I think my view is that um as we go forward, the the the substance of what

we think of as contracts, the substance of what we think of as corporations are going to be software machines themselves. And so we're we're going to

themselves. And so we're we're going to see this progression. And so ARC as an economic operating system is conceived of as a compute environment for laying down all of the building blocks of

economic activity, whether that's storing value, moving money, uh, or instantiating a corporate form or manifesting and intermediating complex contracts. Like a lot of this stuff

contracts. Like a lot of this stuff which was conceptual a long time ago is now like real and we have a legal basis for it. We have a regulatory clarity for

for it. We have a regulatory clarity for it increasingly. Uh and it's interesting

it increasingly. Uh and it's interesting is is that the drivers of this machine economy are actually machines. Uh and so

you know our our view is um uh you know ARC is designed for this moment which is a moment when machines are going to play a larger and larger role in all of the

output of of of uh of the economic system. So if I look at a lot of the

system. So if I look at a lot of the blockchains that um have people have found exciting over the last few years um obviously there's Bitcoin which you know was almost purposefully designed in a certain way to make it a little bit

less adaptable to all these new things that are happening now.

Uh you know Salana, Ethereum etc have been the in the past the traditional places that people have thought about ways to build smart contracts to build a lot of the types of things you just described. What do you think is a

described. What do you think is a difference between some of these more traditional L1s or blockchain and sort of what you're doing at Arc? Yeah. So, a

a few big things. I think the the first is that um you know, as as as I think you were sharing or we were talking about before we started recording, but like um you know, I think a lot of the

designs on blockchains um from from let's call it the early adopter phase, a lot of it was sort of like hey, we're going to build something that is completely um you know, censorship resistant or outside of the reach of

governments. it's sort of like we're

governments. it's sort of like we're building an alternative universe and um and that's like the goal. Um and and I think you know decentralization is itself a good goal but I think as we

move from early adopter to sort of mainstream scaling where you know whether it's you know a major company like Walmart or or it's you know a household that's thinking about like how

they store their wealth the the the intermediaries and there will continue to be intermediaries. We're not all going to be your own bank. um the

intermediaries um have obligations in terms of the the the the kind of like robustness of the infrastructure that they have to run and so ARC is actually set up with a number of features. one is

that it's actually a known validator set and so um the the infrastructure operators of ARC are major financial infrastructure companies and so and and

those are companies that are held to these very high standards for infosc compliance reliability availability some examples of some of the validators on your network so we haven't announced uh the

validators yet um uh but that will come in in due course um but um you know the the the the model uh at a at a high level is that you have financial

companies uh financial infrastructure companies including possibly like large technology companies that are responsible for running the infrastructure. So it's a distributed

infrastructure. So it's a distributed infrastructure but because of that we're able to provide asurances. We're able to provide asurances that like the bad guys aren't running your transactions. Um,

and we can also run assurances that transactions actually have settlement finality. Like they can't be hardforked,

finality. Like they can't be hardforked, they can't be reorged. Um, and so you can get what's called deterministic settlement finality. And that's really

settlement finality. And that's really important whether it's a security or a piece of cash or whatever it is in, you know, in essentially hundreds of milliseconds. And that's really

milliseconds. And that's really important. The the other piece is that

important. The the other piece is that it's sort of designed with real money uh as the foundation. So there's not like a volatile gas token. USDC is actually the default native token which is now under

the law essentially like a legal form of electronic money. So you have real

electronic money. So you have real dollars as the way that people understand and so to a company that's like doing this it's like I pay AWS credits uh I understand how to budget

for that my treasury my operations my compliance etc. So this allows basically for like actual usage to be make sense both to the user to the developer to the

corporations the FIS that that deal with this. So, so that's really important.

this. So, so that's really important.

And then I think the other is like um we've been building in a lot of of uh primitives that are important to like the way that payment systems work, the way that capital markets work, uh the

way that you know the privacy requirements that are needed in some of these cases, but still allowing for like compliance to happen. So, we've kind of purpose-built this for a different uh

kind of set of participants who need to run on it. And we've had the advantage as Circle of working with many of the leading financial institutions that are getting into this space over the last couple years, whether it's the Visas or

the Black Rocks or the Bank of New York Melons or all these types of companies.

So we've had we've been able to work with them and we've been able to work with governments around the world to hear like hey like central bankers all over the world like what's important as you think about like allowing this

internet infrastructure to run the financial system and we're kind of trying to incorporate in a lot of the kind of requirements in the sense that they have and so that's that's very different I think it's a different

design space and I think um you know these new distributed network operating systems will will need to support like the real econ economy's activity not a

kind of shadow economy and so that's just uh substantively different there lot of other technical things I could talk about which um that that are part of it but those are I think helpful just

in terms of framing this what else do you think is interesting that's happening in the crypto world today outside of stable coins and sort of related infrastructure because I know that there was a whole wave of things that people were doing um on the infrastructure side there was e roll-ups

there's a variety of approaches over the last few years besides stable coins is there anything that you think was especially um interesting or they will be impactful or a lot of these things kind of infrastructure looking for solutions or I'm sort of curious how you think about

crypto at large right now. Yeah, I mean look, I think um um there's a lot of attention that has gone into kind of um what I'll broadly call kind of scaling models. And so if you if you take as

models. And so if you if you take as your as your uh kind of design center that these are network computers and these network computers are really good

at establishing uh recordkeeping that is kind of public and available to all and to perform computing on those records that's public and available to all.

That's a as a as a general utility space that's like super super interesting. Um

and so a lot of the a lot of this has been like okay well how do we make sure that that can scale and so as an example right in a in a world of like billions of AI agents that are swarming and doing

other things like scaling this is actually extremely important. So ZK, you know, rollups as an example or zero knowledge proofs more broadly as a way for um proving compute which allows you

to do compute off offchain and then prove it to the onchain. That's actually

really important. So these sort of off-chain or trusted execution environments and other things that provide cryptographic proofs of compute or or or uh other kind of uh assertions

becomes really key. So that actually a lot of that research is now becoming extremely valuable. Um the same thing

extremely valuable. Um the same thing goes for a lot of that research um and development is critical to um enabling privacy and so we want you know we want

all the benefits of of kind of open interoperable kind of permissionless infrastructure but we also want to be able to have privacy um like corporations don't want everyone to see what they do or we don't want to be

doxed and like all this kind of stuff and so the that's now coming into into uh real production that was like researchy for a long time like arc day one is shipping with like built-in

privacy primitives uh which is which is again the result of a lot of work for a long time um and so those are those are important pieces and then um you know I

think as kind of more largecale financial infrastructure comes over to this as we move you know where the New York Stock Exchange or the the biggest derivatives clearing houses are like

yeah we're going to move to an onchain world like the scaling stuff becomes really really critical and so um I I actually feel like now more than ever like those big work streams uh are are

are coming online. And you know if I use as a reference point like you know I spent a long time building on the early internet and the early '9s and the early web and like all this stuff all the way

up until like 2001 for like you know for me it was like 10 years and it was still it was like awful still like it just like you kept grinding and it was like how do we make this useful?

How do we make this useful? How do we make this useful? And then you had, you know, a whole bunch of things happened that were in the background like, you know, Wi-Fi, broadband, you know, uh you

finally got like usable um other internet connected devices and you could actually really start to do stuff. So

you could actually actually deliver software over the internet. You could

actually deliver media over the internet. You could actually do

internet. You could actually do communications like real-time communications over the internet. But it

was like 10 years in the desert or longer before you could even get there.

And I kind of feel that way about the blockchain space. like it's been a dozen

blockchain space. like it's been a dozen years or so and and now we're kind of having like the broadband moment and the demands of society and the financial system, the agentic economy, all of that is sort of coming together at a really interesting time.

I guess one thing that people have been talking about for a long time in the crypto world is securization of other assets on the blockchain.

Yeah.

And so that would be stocks. So should

you be able to buy fractions of Birkshar Haway?

Yep.

Um using crypto.

Yeah. uh and should that be globally available given the success of USDC and other stable coins that's made it even more interesting in terms of approvable model when do you think that stuff will happen

and what approach do you think will be taken and how does that tie into the agentic world it's totally happening um there's a great site if people are interested called RWA.xyz XYZ, real world assets is

called RWA.xyz XYZ, real world assets is sort of what that refers to. RWXYZ. I'm

very proud because uh there there are tokenized uh stocks that are out there and the most uh uh active tokenized stock today is not Tesla. It's it's not

the S&P index. It's actually circled.

Um so that was cool to see. Um we also uh you know have seen this growth in like tokenized money markets. So

basically like onchain treasury bills.

We actually operate the largest tokenized treasury uh product called USYC, like US fieldcoin. Um that's uh that's grown quite fast as well. Um and

we we run the largest tokenized euro as well, uh EURC. And so we're we're definitely like looking at this this broading out. I think um there's a huge

broading out. I think um there's a huge effort right now at every layer of the whole financial system stack to go into tokenization. So all the way down at the

tokenization. So all the way down at the layer of like the people that keep the records of the stock which is like you know if if you're familiar like the computer shares of the worldities of the

world up to like the the layers that like are the depository clearing systems like the DTCC which you know most people don't know but it's actually like the back plane of how all securities work

like they're moving to tokenize and then the actual like brokers and exchanges want to take those and support those tokens and and trading on those tokens and distribution of those tokens. So

NASDAQ, New York Stock Exchange, all of them, they're all doing this as we speak. And as we speak, the SEC has been

speak. And as we speak, the SEC has been providing clear guidelines on how to do that. And so they actually issued

that. And so they actually issued guidance just about a month or so ago that basically said, here's what you do in all these layers. Here's, you know, here's your obligations. And so we're at

a point where like technology and then the market's desire is creating that.

And right now the interesting thing about things like tokenized stocks is um mostly it's interesting to enable people not in the US to access these. Um that's

where a lot of the growth has happened because not everyone has access uh you know used to go the the other way right there used to be Chinese stocks that were basically held in uh third party instruments that you could purchase Yeah.

on stock exchanges so you could participate in some of the Chinese listed.

Yeah. There's I mean that's definitely uh some of the packagers like of like ETFs and funds and stuff have kind of mirroring um for sure. Um but um you

know I think like uh this is similar to like you know when when we went through like the web becoming available or broadband really hitting uh the scale a lot of times people just think oh I have

this existing product I can now put it over here like here's the TV show I'm going to put the TV show over here. I

think um what becomes a lot more interesting or here's the game. It's

this game that used to be on a CD and now I can you can download it or whatever. I think the really interesting

whatever. I think the really interesting thing is like what can you do that you couldn't do before what kind of utility gets unlocked whether it's fractionalization or how you can how you

can borrow and lend on these things or um how you could package them together in different ways and and enable and AI could play a pretty significant role in that as well. seems like it could really tie into some of the prediction market stuff as well that's been happening

because to some extent the world's biggest prediction markets are actually stock markets and so or financial markets I should say more broadly.

Yeah. And and and prediction markets themselves are becoming kind of um a kind of parallel infrastructure for people who participate in stock markets.

Right. In fact, the biggest adopters, it seems, of the market makers of prediction markets are actually the people who are trying to figure out the what is reality and what does that mean for companies and equities and stuff and

the interplayer or or or whatnot. Um and

uh and yeah, I mean we're we're seeing that I mean USDC powers polyarket for example. Um and uh and and so the same

example. Um and uh and and so the same guys that are, you know, trading derivatives over here on on, you know, oil or Bitcoin over here are also like I'm moving my money quickly using USDC

over here to like figure out what's going to happen in some uh event. Let's

call the one other thing that I think has been happening a little bit recently is there's been a couple papers that have been focused on um basically tying proof of work into just generic inference work.

Yes.

In other words, can you tie those two things? say you're being very um GPU

things? say you're being very um GPU efficient in terms of what you're doing, but also you can effectively generate incremental revenue through GPU usage while you're using it for inference or other purposes.

I'm really interested in that. Uh and

and and I think um again a little conversation we were having before we recorded like you know proof of work obviously um was itself an innovation

and and sort of um essentially like the exhaust of the proof of work of Bitcoin is is just like the exhaust of energy consumption and so it doesn't actually

in some ways it's waste in a sense the the energy is is waste and and so I think the idea of uh essentially like

inference compute uh uh as GPU uh inference compute as proof of work and so the work itself is the inference and uh that as the underlying basis for

proofof work uh cryptocurrency is pretty interesting um and uh would would be you know potentially something that could align with the kind of monetary principles of something like Bitcoin

but actually uh be productive uh productive proof of work that's really interesting and so you know I I my my own view and this is like you know I

think goes back a long time is like the you know people have kind of axiomatically sort of assumed like well Bitcoin is the the the the the thing it got the network effects it has

all this um and I've always said like I don't know what we're going to be using in 10 years like we don't know now um Bitcoin has lasted a really long time um but I think like the paradigm shift that

we're seeing in in um in energy infrastru structure in the performance of of you know the conversion of energy into intelligence and the compute layers and that it certainly opens up a new

avenue to think about this that wasn't readily available you know 15 years ago so if you were to give one piece of advice to agents it would not be by bitcoin

I'm just joking I have a better question um so in terms of um say we were to think out 10 years um what does that world look like in your mind and obviously we're going through a period of intense change.

Yeah, I'm finding it incredibly hard to predict the future right now in terms of just what's going to happen in AI, much less AI plus crypto plus the global economic system plus everything else.

So given all that and putting that aside, yeah, exactly. Um, what is your vision of the future?

Yeah.

Well, I mean a couple things I I would say uh the the the first is is sort of the the thing that everyone is debating right now is the pace of AI diffusion, right? So what is the pace of AI

right? So what is the pace of AI diffusion and and what does that then imply in terms of the the kind of amount of change that we're going to have to deal with? And so that's all debatable,

deal with? And so that's all debatable, right? You you hear Daario debating that

right? You you hear Daario debating that versus others and and so on. But like it definitely feels like, you know, the diffusion limiters are are um in in in some cases bureaucratic, in some cases

legal, in some cases human risk or other things, right? But we have we have these

things, right? But we have we have these limiters that are there. Um but it does seem like um the the pace of diffusion is accelerating and will continue to

accelerate and um and and that's pretty dramatic and and so I guess like my own view um it's it's very rooted in my own like political and economic philosophy

is is that um we we have a real opportunity to uh create um essentially new new social, political and economic

organizational structures um And and in in many ways like we have to there's a a kind of um you know in these periods whether it's the the enlightenment and and the industrial revolution and other

things like there's these periods where um there's like a a new definition of the social contract and and that new definition of the social contract is then in turn reflected in social

political and economic ordering and the mechanisms that we use for those things.

And I it feels like to me like we're going to be we're going to be forced through that. And um and I think you

through that. And um and I think you know that's simultaneously like terrifying and exciting etc. And and and I am of the view that we are going to have a a a kind of lag effect between

the disruption and the establishment of those new institutional forms. Um but at the same time I actually believe like new institutional forms are going to be emergent out of this. And so as I talked

about earlier like the formation of these kind of onchain organizations that have different forms of of governance and contracting and uh and and a mixture of human and and agentic uh actors like

that seems like we're going to have a lot more of that. we're going to probably have huge proliferation of that and it may be that those corporate forms um are like the most productive corporate forms that we've ever seen in

economic history and and then you know they'll they'll need to be kind of like an overlay into the governance systems of of uh you know political uh or

organizations and and systems as well and it um yeah so you like my view is uh we're going to have simultaneously all

around the called um a renegotiation of the social contract and it's going to be uh it it is going to require um new systems of participation in economics

and governance that we haven't had. Um

that's like very high level mumbo jumboy but it's also um you know sort of how how I think about it at a high level.

That's super interesting. Have you ever read a book called Lady Amazes?

No. It's like a sci-fi book from I don't know 15 years ago about the post-hi world and part of it is um as a big enough block or demographic emerges in human society. Uh an overlay AI agent

human society. Uh an overlay AI agent that's observing everything spawns a specific agent that represents that viewpoint that then is part of this sort of virtual senate of agents negotiating policy. So it's kind of this interesting

policy. So it's kind of this interesting view of how can you spontaneously spawn these sorts of systems from a governance perspective which is kind of cool.

I would love to read that. what is your prediction um in so if you look at a lot of p ways of technology their actual impact to GDP has been difficult to tease out right so the productivity gains of the

internet versus actual GDP growth or things like that have been notorious and there's all sorts of reasons for that it could be measurement it could be deflationary aspects of some of these things that could be a variety of things how do you think about the GDP

impact of AI so if you think ahead five years and you know what what do you think the global economy is 10% bigger 50% % bigger, three times the size. Does that even matter as a metric

size. Does that even matter as a metric anymore? Like,

anymore? Like, yeah, I mean, um, like I I I see this debated all the time and Kathy Woods talking about, you know, we're going to have 10% GDP growth for the 2030s and,

you know, etc. Um, I I I don't quite know what to think. I

mean I think um you know it it's it's quite plausible that the um the the kind of giant leaps that we see in kind of

productive output in a huge range of of industrial to other commercial services uh etc like really drives a very

significant discontinuous jump in in in in GDP at an absolute level. it'll have

in many ways probably less meaning than we've historically had with GDP. Um and

you know the kind of uh economic well-being indexes that we think about like GDP uh will be you know the risk here is that GDP uh effectively like the GDP growth is a sort of capital

capturing more capital uh at the at the expense of of humans like that's the real risk. Um and so like GDP growth

real risk. Um and so like GDP growth generally has been like a really great thing. Um uh and and so the the question

thing. Um uh and and so the the question is is like is will it remain a great thing? Do we have the new social

thing? Do we have the new social contract to to to deal with that yet? Um

but I guess my my general view just sort of as a technologist talking about you know seeing what we see with diffusion and and kind of other other changes like

um it does it does feel like uh we have the potential for double digit GDP numbers in the 2030s like that's that seems not unrealistic to me. Not that

that's going to be uniform all around the world but certainly um in large large parts of the world that seems very uh you know achievable. uh based on what I see.

Mhm. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today at No Prior. Super

interesting conversation. Thank you.

Find us on Twitter at no prior pod.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way you get a new

you listen. That way you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-briers.com.