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Just like you use your dollars with an online payment service, you can still be defrauded USDC. It wasn't the dollars that defrauded you. It was the other side of it." Jeremy Allaire
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I actually believe the web of value exchange. Whatever you want to call it, the internet of value is going to be extraordinarily more valuable and extraordinarily more impactful than the web of information." Jeremy Allaire
Episode Summary:
In this episode of The Raz Report, Jason Raznick speaks with Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle.
Hosts:
Jason Raznick
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonraznick
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Transcript:
BZ: We're very excited to have on this edition of the RazReport, Jeremy Allaire founder and CEO of Circle
You're going to hear about building companies, building enterprises and Circle USDC, which is taking the world by storm in a good way.
Jeremy, welcome to the show.
J: Thank you, Jason. Psyched to be here.
BZ: Circle your latest company, I think you've raised over 700 million over $700 million for it. Is that correct?
J: that's exactly right.
BZ:When you founded this company in 2013 is it where you thought it would be?
J: when we founded the company back in 2013, there were a whole set of ideas that we had about digital currency.
We were very excited about this idea that you could build what we like to think of back then as an HTTP of money, meaning like a protocol for money on the internet. And by money we meant traditional money.The liabilities of a central bank, what we think of as everyday money. But convey onto that money, the power of cryptocurrency.
So Bitcoin obviously itself brought into the world, this idea of a protocol that could work on a decentralized infrastructure to enable people to directly exchange value in digital cash like way.
We wanted to build on that same fundamental technology foundation, but enable people to exchange, stable value assets, like dollars or Euros. And we believe that a kind of protocol layer for money would eventually become possible on top of these blockchain infrastructures. And that was a core mission and goal from the outset.
We experimented with realizing that idea through building on a lot of, kind of digital currency banking infrastructure, we built a consumer facing application that kind of brought that to life. We actually built it on top of Bitcoin, which was the first-generation blockchain that was available back in 2013 and 2014 and 2015. And in during that time period, and then eventually in 2016, when ethereum, which is the second generation blockchain technology really emerged, it introduced more of the building blocks that we had been looking for back in 2013, when we founded the company.
ETH allowed us in 2017 to begin work on and then also release what's now known as USDC, which is in fact the protocol for dollars on the internet and eventually other Fiat currencies too. But founding vision was there, the path to it obviously takes many, shifts.
The metaphor I like to use is you can see the mountaintop. You can literally, standing far back, you can see that mountain top and how beautiful that looks, but you actually don't know how you're going to get to the top of the mountain. And you may actually go up one path and realize, oh, I'm staring over a cliff. I need to go back down and go up another.
BZ: Ethereum is what allowed you to go create USDC?
J: So back in 2012 and 2013 there, there were a lot of technologists or not a lot, actually back then, there was a lot now, but there were technologists getting involved in this space. And a lot of us got really excited about ideas issuing other assets on top of the blockchain or smart contracts and programmable money and what it would mean if you could have if you could say issue a dollar token and have a smart contract that could enable the programmability of that was like a mind-blowing concept.
Early in my career, I worked on programming languages, app development, infrastructure, developer platforms, content infrastructure, lots of things like that. And so had a background in thinking about, developer platforms and the idea of a developer, an open infrastructure that was like a developer platform for money on the internet was super exciting. And so there were a lot of ideas on how to do it in 2013. It just technically wasn't possible.
The history of Ethereum is really relevant here because Vitalik, who also was really excited about a lot of these ideas of how you can extend this kind of blockchain infrastructure to do other things. A lot of people thought that might happen that Bitcoin itself as an open source project would evolve to do those things. But there was an ideological battle between those in the core development community who really wanted to keep Bitcoin simple and focused on being a kind of digital gold store of value.
Then there's a whole other group of technologists that wanted to advance this into being something that's more like an operating system that you could build a lot of things on top of including things like protocols for stable coins,DEFI, NFTs, DAOs all these things that have emerged. So it was really that kind of forking off and development of a new infrastructure layer that then made it possible to pursue and execute something like USDC.
BZ: Jeremy, where did you grow up?
J:I grew up in a small town in Southeastern Minnesota, a town called Wynnona Minnesota. I went to college in the St. Paul McAllister college and studied political science philosophy and a concentration in economics.
I got introduced to the internet in my dorm room, literally in, in 1990 had a high-speed internet connection, which in 1990, there was not a lot you could do on the internet, but I was down the rabbit hole became completely obsessed, made all of my educational work about it and started using it in my studies around what was happening in the former Soviet Union and what was happening in the sort of changing revolutions around the world and got me excited about the idea of an open network, open permissionless networks, decentralization, disintermediation, a lot of these themes that still show up today in the internet space got me into it. And then graduated college there and started working on my first company.
BZ: Did you ever go to Mall of America when you were growing up?
J:So mall of America merged when I was a little bit older, I think when I was in college.
BZ: But as a kid, did you have side hustles where you like selling the newspaper? Like Mark Cuban was doing the garbage bags? Were you doing that?
J: I was a paper boy, that was my first job if you want to call it. But I actually had, I got really lucky in a sense when I was a teenager. I convinced my parents to take, like some, a small amount of money. I had been passed down to me from my grandparents and was in like mutual funds, which was a big deal in the eighties. You had mutual funds. I convinced them to let me invest it into baseball cards.
So in the kind of mid to late eighties, I ran Southern Cordillera sports cards. So I ran a trading operation and I would deal and I would go and basically do baseball cards. So that was my side hustle that helped me pay for my spending money in college.
BZ:Did you have tables ? So you'd buy cards, flip them and did you make some decent money doing it?
J:Absolutely. Yeah, so I took long positions. Okay. On on term sort of players. Mark McGuire, Jose Conseco, that's just some of the big ones
BZ:What was one of your best trades?
J: Brett saberHagan was, 19, he had just an incredible record and I like accumulated a huge bunch of those. And then that was a short-term trade. I keep thinking in a bunch and then flip them at a huge increase in value as everyone wanted the Brett Saberhagen for a piece that I think that was one of the best one of the best trades I did.
I would do arbitrage.That's where I go to these shows. find someone who really, wanted X and I would just run around and find it, buy it for Y and then turn it around. So there's that. And then, I had I still have a fairly sizable collection.
BZ: How did you get involved in internet in college?
J: I had a T1 which was basically like a hard wire, it was effectively ethernet, but hardwired into a campus that were, and, campuses where some of the only places that had access to the internet for research purposes. And a T1 was, even now was whatever, I, that was back then 1.5 megabits per second, which was really good.
BZ: You're in college and you're exploring this whole open network of sorts were your parents supportive of that?
J: No, not at all. They were like, I don't know what this is. I don't understand this.I graduated college in 1993 the tail end of the first Gulf war recession.
. I studied, what I would thought would be interesting to help understand the world and whatnot. And so I was like temping and but, and, on the side I was just going deeper and deeper into the internet space.And and I remember coming home, I quit my temp job and said, fuck this, I'm going to be an internet consultant. I called myself, which was basically like helping educate people about how businesses, how to use the internet and actually, working on the very, very first websites, this was before, even like Mosaic was out, was hacking around.
Basically how helping organizations figure out how to build stuff from the web. And I went home and my father was just so distraught and just so afraid that, he didn't understand any of it. And he was like, this isn't a job, so concerned. I was following my bliss and it was good timing in 1993 to be really going down that rabbit hole and learning all the technology and figuring out what it was to. Build stuff back then. That led to the Genesis of some of the first products that I helped build and create.
BZ: You called yourself an internet consultant?
J: So there all these people learning HTML, and then in 1995, more people.
I really wanted to be able to do interactive apps where you could connect a database, you could have interactivity. And my idea was that anyone should be able to build a global online service because back then, like the idea of an online service was you had to have AOL, or you have to have, CompuServe or whatnot.
But I was convinced that an open network that anyone could publish to or any device could connect to, it would be a lot better. And so working with my brother, who's a much more of a computer scientist than I am, became the product manager designer for cold fusion and hidden the kind of chief architect. And we ended up working through a lot of ideas and building essentially the first easy to use web programming language and what is now known as an app server, an application server, one of the very first commercial app server, which basically was a piece of software you can put on a machine connected database, do transactions, dynamically generate webpages. And, that paradigm now, is everything from SAS and content management and everything else on, on the internet. So built that and, got super passionate about enabling developers to dream what they wanted to build on the internet, everything from content to community, to e-commerce, to all kinds of things and built, developer platform business.I find it, you can find it out there.
There's still millions of sites with that are still run by that it's now owned by Adobe. That product line is owned by Adobe, which bought Macromedia, which is I merged my first company or we merged layer into Macromedia as public company.
BZ: And when you started Cold Fusion, you and your brother, what'd you call the coming like the layer corporation?
J:.We had a whole family of products. We had the most popular HTML web development tool in the world Homesite.
Literally millions of developers use Homesite. So most websites in the 1990s were built using that. And it was one of the reasons why Macromedia wanted to acquire us because they had Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver was really popular with professional designers.
But like the average Joe or Jane would get Homesite it was free. And it was like super powerful HTML editor. And so we had millions of people using that.So no, like no one used front page, because it was so awful because it forced you into like these templates you couldn't get control. So Homesite was like gave you access to the HTML and made it really easy to edit the HTML. And we gave it away for free. It was like a feed, it was a freemium product. We wanted to get it out there. And then we got other people into our more advanced products.
BZ: So you were doing freemium before, that was even a word. Okay. Did you raise money for Cold Fusion?
J:I think it was three rounds of venture capital and then like a mezzanine financing. And then we IPOed in January of 1999.
We were a public company on NASDAQ for 2 years. And in January of 2001, we merged with Macromedia, which was about three times larger than us. And merged the two public companies. And I became the chief technology officer of Macromedia.
BZ: IPO process versus the M&A process? Which did you like better?
J:I like building. And operating. I I like that a lot. it's interesting, there are times and places where M&A makes sense both as a buyer and as a seller, obviously the vast majority of outcomes and business are some form of merger transaction typically or in bankruptcy. So the number of companies that remain independent is smaller.
But I think both had a lot of advantages back at that period of time merging at the time was a really good thing for our company and actually gave us a much stronger platform that was, as you recall, when 9/11 happened and the entirety of the certainty of the market, and really the demand for internet software and stuff collapsed alongside the collapse of the.com.
BZ: So Brightcove, how did you get to start that?
J: So in 2002, when I was chief technology officer Macromedia, we put the ability to render video and PR and have video as like a programmable object in something called flash player and flash player at the time was the most ubiquitous piece of software in the history of the internet.
98% of computers in the world had it. We could actually upgrade the internet to a completely new virtual machine that essentially like a new client in like less than 12 months. So we put video in and it was right before broadband came out and like for consumers.
And it was really clear to me looking at broadband wifi devices that can be connected to those.And then having a ubiquitous playback mechanism for video. I got really excited, started incubating ideas inside of Macromedia for basically self publishing, self video publishing type of applications actually built something internally that the company did not want to bring to market. I was really frustrated.
My vision was video's going to become as ubiquitous as text on the web. Everyone's going to become a video publisher. Every business is going to be able to distribute television quality video to devices everywhere. And so this was in like 2002, 2003. And so I got frustrated and left, went to a VC as a technologist and resident general catalyst and incubated brightCove.
And then founded it in 2004, really with this idea that again, video was going to become as ubiquitous as texts on the web and that you needed a new generation of publishing platforms for it. That could integrate everything that was needed for either a brand like a corporation. Or an organization or a media company itself to basically do direct distribution of television instead of relying on cable and satellite and all the old ways and transform other media companies who work in television and video into being into television and video. So it was a video platform company, a SAS company, as we now call these and founded it in 2004.
it had a really nice growth run. And I took it public in early 2012. And then stepped into a chairman role after about a year. Cause I had gone down the crypto rabbit hole in 2013 just became obsessed with.What was going on in crypto and made a decision to basically, start Circle.
BZ: Mark Cuban emailed me a question, Mark Cuban's known you from his tech days. His question is "what did you learn from your layer or your database days that you are applying today?"
J: it's actually really relevant. As I talk about the inspiration for circle and what, I've been inspired by, , in this space. in, in many ways, right?
What got me super excited about the internet in the first place was this kind of obsession with the idea of the internet itself, being an open network that was permissionless that anyone could bring a computer to and connect, and that anyone who did that could take open protocols like the SMTP protocol or the HTTP protocol or the VOIP protocol, or these sort of protocols, which are really just public IP, intellectual property, that's open source it's in the public domain.
People can write software to it and that you could connect anyone anywhere through these protocols and do really amazing things in terms of information, exchange, knowledge, exchange communications so powerful. That's what drew me into the internet in the first place and kind of an obsession with open networks, decentralized and distributed model.
What that could unleash and really a belief that architecture could maximize access and could maximize the ability for people to to reach the most people in the world and entrepreneurship and ideas. So that's what kind of, that was what informed. The work around cold fusion back then. And so if I fast forward to crypto, that was fundamentally the insight for me in 2012 and early 2013 was this is just like a replay.
This is just another open protocol on the public permissionless internet that solved a set of problems that hadn't been solved before, which was a way to ensure that data could not be counterfeited. And that transactions could happen in with certainty in an irreversible way without requiring centralization. And these are big ideas and it was like a fundamental new infrastructure layer. The internet was being born. And so when I looked at it and said, okay, This is going to do for the exchange of value. And I don't just mean moving value from point a to point b, I'm talking about the richness of what we do in exchanging value.
As people, as entities, as corporations it's going to do for the exchange of value, what the web and those earlier protocols did for information and communications.
And to me in 2013, like that was so profound because I actually believe the web of value exchange.If you want to, whatever you want to call it, the internet of value is going to be extraordinarily more valuable and extraordinarily more impactful than the web of information. And so it very much informed how I think about this and the work that we're doing here.
BZ: When you started Circle, did you start with anyone else?
J: I co-founded, the company was Sean Neville. Sean is absolutely brilliant. He he co-led the company with me almost like co-CEOs for a long time. And then several years ago, he just stepped into a director role. He's on the board of directors and he runs a crypto incubator, a crypto kind of studio incubator.
But he and I had worked together back Allaire, my first company we worked together a bunch at Macromedia. We worked together and bright Cove. He's just one of the most brilliant minds technological minds, strategic minds, creative minds.
BZ: Was Circle easier to raise money for than your previous ventures because of your huge track record of success?
J: When we started the company, I went to people who invested with me and who had made money with me in the past and said, this is what I'm working on. And they're like, Bitcoin I don't get this. You're crazy. This seems crazy. But. We believe in you, so go for it. I mean that kinda kind of thing. So it definitely helped.
2013 and then 2014, 2015, during that time, there were not a lot of quote unquote adults in the room, in the space. If people think it's a wild west, now it was an extraordinary wild west back then. And we had, seasoned entrepreneurs, technologists.
We had a really strong proactive approach with regulators with kind of major fiduciaries and really worked really hard to try and build something that was compliant and that, differentiated us as well and allowed us to raise quite a bit of capital. I think, a couple hundred million dollars within our first few years of getting started.
BZ: And were you personally buying Bitcoin back in those early days?
J: Yeah, absolutely. And buying ethereum and when it was less than a dollar. Like Solana and it was less than a dollar.
BZ: Do you still own some of that?
J: I am a owner of crypto assets. I don't talk about my particular trading and liquidity strategies, I'm quite structurally long on crypto.
BZ: How would you define a stable coin to a fifth grader ?
J: On the internet today, I can download a piece of software like WhatsApp or or log into a service like Gmail. We're open up Google Chrome, and I can connect to anyone else. Directly, I can have a direct communication with them. It doesn't cost me anything. It doesn't matter where they are in the world.As long as they have a smartphone, they can get that piece of software. We can do that. Or if there's someone who has an idea and wants to connect their computer, the internet and put some content on it, as long as I have a web browser, I can connect to that. And that's generally the case other than, some authoritarian regimes that have great firewalls.
But even there, like it's generally the case, you can connect to anyone. I can freely communicate with anyone in China right now. And that model is so straightforward. It's the air we breathe. We don't even think about it. the fact that this kind of open connect and open permissionless, global decentralized network of communications and information exists. So why can't we do that with money?
Why can't we have a way. Someone can just download a piece of software from an app store. And and then someone else could download a different piece of software made by a different creator or a different piece of hardware, or log into a service and exchange value with each other instantly globally frictionlessly at no cost. it's really that simple is how do we make it possible for storing, moving dollars or digital dollars to work in exactly the same way we have with information and data. And that's what we set out to solve is that problem and doing it on the DNA of the internet, doing it around this idea of an open protocol that anyone could connect to. So that's really the fundamentals of what USDC allows for. And, but I think. Yeah the idea goes far broader because you now have essentially an open API for dollars on the internet and it's programmable dollars on the internet. And so you can do a lot with that. And the use cases are really exploding,
BZ:How big is USDC these days?
J:So USDC has grown really fast at the start of the pandemic, there were about 400 million USDC in circulation that was just like, let's call it six months. Or, there's a year after or so after we had launched.
Then it grew to 4 billion in circulation by the start of 2021. And it grew from 4 billion to 42 billion in circulation. At the end of 2021 and it's already grown to to over 52 billion in circulation, just in the past couple months here.
And so USDC is about that big and I supported, trillions of dollars of transactions. Just on the public internet using blockchains. And it's still early days. It's super early days. Our view is that eventually there could be more than a trillion USDC in circulation and could be used for every imaginable use case for money and use cases that we haven't even thought of because programmable money is not existed until now.
BZ: How can USDC offer such nice interest rates when banks are giving 0.5%?
J: Look so if you think about. And you have a kind of base layer, which is the sort of digital cash equivalent of USDC. And it's a regulated, digital cash instrument that exists. And it's very easy to exchange, right? With point to point as your friends or others, that you've talked to really straightforward to send it, receive it, use it.
And it's become very popular as a digital currency to use in trading, investing, international payments, other things. And so as its utility has grown and as more and more people and firms want to use. +
As a form of working capital as a new kind of electronic stored value working capital mechanism, there's higher and higher demand for people who want to borrow it. And so one of the really powerful things about blockchains is not only do they allow these fast transactions to happen, but you can actually build essentially, borrowing and lending models on top of it.
And so there's grown over the past in particular, the past several years, the last two to three years, large, both centralized, what are often called CEFI lending markets and what are called DEFI lending markets, where the market of borrowers and lenders is convened by a piece of software on the internet. So you're not dealing with a company you're just dealing with a protocol, but nonetheless you have essentially interest rate markets of borrowers and lenders.
The demand to borrow USDC is high. And the interest rate that borrowers are willing to pay is high. And that is the source of those yields. Basically you have borrowers and to put it fairly simply the other side of that borrowing and I'll use circle yield as an example, because it's the one I understand probably the most you lend us USDC and we lend it wholesale to institutional borrowers. So these are in fact, hedge funds, family offices, systemic trading firms, electronic markets, firms, or other major firms in the ecosystem that want to operate using USDC. And these are firms that are borrowing at a high interest rate, but who are generating returns in north of that.
An 8% interest rate to borrow at an 8% interest rate or borrowed 10% interest rate. That's not unheard of in a lot of things. Our credit cards are 20% interest rates or 17% interest rates. venture debt, which is what startups borrow typically have interest rates of, 10, 12, 13, 14% on them. interest rates in securities lending markets, which is the interest rates that say an institutional fund would pay to borrow against their stock can be fairly high now, corporate debt that's underwritten where a corporation's borrowing against their balance sheet and their P&L and it's underwritten by an investment bank and has a coupon and rating. So that tends to be a lower interest rate debt product.
But generally when you look at interest rates that people borrow, right? They vary from, most single digits to high double digits or higher. And so what you have in USDC is you have a borrowing lending markets that exist at the retail and institutional level, and those are floating right now. So in DEFI right now, you can borrow you can borrow you USDC I think for 3%. the interest rate markets adapt to kind of market conditions and demand.
BZ: How secure is my money in USDC ?
J:The thing to remember is USDC itself is is regulated examine it's the USDC itself is A full reserve dollar digital currency.
Now, if you're lending your USDC to someone else you're determining what is the credit risk that I'm taking with, who I'm lending to. It has nothing to do with USDC. It has to do with what are they doing with it? So there are some major differences, right? Are you a secured creditor or are you an unsecured creditor? is this unsecured credit that's then being used to do highly speculative trading or is, this secured credit with known institutional counterparties? So you're dealing with a huge variance.
I like to use the example of a bank, right? If you walk into a branch of Chase and you say here's $10,000, you're depositing, and you're not depositing $10,000, you're lending chase $10,000.
And you have a balance that says $10,000. But actually what you have is you have a claim against their loan book. They're taking that $10,000 and they're lending it out eight times over. And you're basically saying, Hey, I think that they're going to be good for that, that the small business loans, the credit card loans, the home mortgages, the corporate debt, all the stuff that they're doing to take my money and lend it out on a fractional reserve basis eight times. But fundamentally, you've got an IOU and now, you might look at a dollar that you've deposited and chase really different than s let's say you went to a bank in Zimbabwe and they said, you can deposit your dollars. And you say I don't know, what are you going to do with my dollars? And so it all comes down to, w what in fact are you w what, in fact are you seeing on the other side of that?
So we've tried to design something with circle yield, which is very institutionally friendly. It's regulated, it's supervised it's over collateralized and it only, faces the best quality institutional wholesale borrowers on the other side. And so we've just tried to build some. I think the kinds of features that make it attractive, it doesn't produce the highest yields. It doesn't produce the same yields you might see through some of these retail platforms, but there's a reason for that.
BZ: Is there a chance of defaulting?
J: this has become a major issue from an investor protection regime, right? So very clearly, like I think the SEC, his view is that these are lending products. They're not banks. And in fact, for the average person they're basically making an investment and a lot of these are offered as an, they're unregistered investment contracts in a sense. What is an S1? And that's one is a public disclosure document that a retail investor can read and understand. And you can decide, you can read through the S one and say what are the risks? What is this? What am I actually getting into here? And so that's fair disclosure. So that's people and, the review of a major regulator the SEC.
And so that's one, one standard to look at, there are others that, don't have any of that. And so you don't actually know what the underlying risk is other than the reps that are made through marketing, or maybe some high level stuff. And so I think you have to, you have to look at this through, through that lens. now DEFI is a different story. if you get USDC. DEFI protocols have some advantages to them. But they also have a whole lot of risks to them as well.
There've been DEFI protocols that were hacked. And this is like software and all of a sudden the money is managed by software and the software gets hacked and they, that's gone, but you have some, defined protocols that are more pressure tested. There's probably going to be more and more disclosure audit type requirements on defy protocols over time, as well as the market participants want to have better hygiene around them. I think, buyer beware on all this stuff.
BZ: USDC has a brand. So do you talk to these exchanges to make sure that they're trying to make sure that borrowers are good ?
J: Because USDC is a free floating digital currency it can be utilized in so many different applications in so many different businesses and so on. And you've got, electronic markets firms that might be.
Doing a trade with someone with USDC for $300 million in one transaction, you've got other, NFT markets that are utilizing USDC for payments on pieces of digital content and the, and those are, multiple layers removed. it is important though, that we need to always ensure that people understand USDC as a dollar digital currency itself is safe, stable, transparent regulated, compliant, all these things.
Just like you use your dollars with an online payment service, you can still be defrauded. It wasn't the dollars that defrauded you. It was the other side of it.
BZ: Do you have a minute to talk CND ?
J:We initially negotiated a merger with Concord acquisition and business combination agreement in July of last year.
And getting through the SEC qualifications taken a bit longer than we had expected. We had thought it would be, consistent with other spots
4-5 months it's just taken longer and which is fine, and we're getting through it. We're making progress through every round of comments. But as we walked into the new year the business outlook has changed pretty significantly. The company grew USDC really rapidly. We're in a rising interest rate environment.
Our transaction and treasury services businesses are taking hold nicely. And so we looked at the actual deal was set to expire in April. And so we we re-negotiated the deal.
We extended the timeline so that it had enough time to get through the dispatch and the, in the sec process.
We also eliminated the pipe from the first year. we also issued revised financial outlook for 2022 and 2023, which are considerably stronger from from a both a top line and a bottom line perspective from where we were, nine months earlier or whatever that exact timeline is.
And so the increase in the value of the company is really reflective of the tremendous position that we've put ourselves in with the business and obviously the new outlook.
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