Circle founder Jeremy Allarie talks about stablecoins: We haven't reached the iPhone moment of blockchain yet, stablecoins will change the world. The original intention of founding Circle: When the 2008 financial crisis occurred, it inspired my early academic thinking and turned me into a 'political economist on the couch', crazily reading various materials about the nature of currency, central banks, international monetary system, and partial reserve requirement system. I was wondering what was going on? Have you also started thinking about whether there is a better currency system? Is there a better way to build the international financial system? How to build a safer and more open financial system? These thoughts converged and became the only thing on my mind. I almost became obsessed and eventually decided to start Circle. In the spring of 2018, the cryptocurrency market experienced a significant downturn, followed by a severe winter for the entire industry. It was at this time that we officially launched USDC in October 2018. At that time, I firmly believed that the era of stable currencies had come, and they would eventually become the core component of the global monetary system, and stable currencies were the most suitable monetary structure in the Internet era. In January 2020, we invested all our funds in this, and the homepage of Circle's official website became a huge billboard promoting "stablecoins are the future of the international financial system". The only button on the page was to obtain USDC. 3/After the COVID-19 epidemic, many people began to transfer funds into digital dollars out of distrust of their own financial system; At the same time, governments around the world have also introduced large-scale emergency stimulus policies in an attempt to inject liquidity into the market to prevent the economy from falling into a Great Depression. So you see a highly coordinated super loose policy emerging globally, leading to a large influx of funds into the market. USDC has also surged from $400 million in circulation at the beginning of 2020 to $40 billion within a year, which can be said to be a dramatic and explosive growth. 4/The prerequisite for the popularization of stablecoins: (1) Infrastructure. What we need is an operating system based blockchain network with higher performance and stronger throughput. (2) Network effects, such as stablecoins like USDC, are actually a type of network-based product platform that developers will use to build applications. The more applications are connected, the stronger the practicality of the entire network, and the more users have stablecoins, the greater the utility of the network, thus forming a positive cycle. (3) Improvement in usability. (4) The final ultimate challenge is government regulation. 5/Current market environment for stablecoins: (1) Currently, almost all major jurisdictions worldwide, from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, to Europe, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and even the United States, are introducing relevant laws to clarify stablecoins as legal electronic currencies and incorporate them into the formal financial system. (2) We can see more and more institutions that I call FinTech friendly banks, or emerging digital banks, starting to natively support the use of stablecoins. Of course, this also includes large cryptocurrency companies such as Coinbase and Binance, which together have over 400 million users. To some extent, they have become financial super applications. (3) And now we are already collaborating with Visa and MasterCard, both of whom have projects that allow card issuers to issue cards that appear to be Visa or MasterCard, but actually use stablecoins such as USDC for consumption. (4) We are also seeing some changes happening on the other side - that is, merchant acquirers are also joining in, such as Worldpay, Checkout.com, Nuvei, Stripe, etc., which are providing options for merchants to settle in USDC. Regarding regulation: We always adhere to the concept of prioritizing regulation and choose to take the main route to ensure that we have a good and robust compliance system. We have obtained regulatory permits in Singapore and Europe, and are also working with Japan and other places to establish compliant distribution channels. This means that institutions can open accounts and create or redeem USDC in the Singapore banking system, Hong Kong banking system, Brazilian banking system, US banking system, and European banking system. 7/Business model of stablecoins: Firstly, when we receive US dollars, these dollars will be pre deposited into a reserve account before minting USDC. These reserve funds are segregated accounts established for the benefit of customers in accordance with legal requirements. According to legal and regulatory requirements, we must isolate these funds, and only after completing the isolation can we issue electronic currency instruments, with ownership of the funds belonging to the customers. Currently, about 90% of the reserves are held in an account called the Circle Reserve Fund. Additionally, approximately 10% of the reserves are primarily held in cash in several globally systemically important banks, commonly known as' big but not bankrupt 'banks. This is also a change after the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank. 8/Circle's Future: I want to be very clear that we have not yet ushered in the iPhone moment of blockchain. What we really need is a blockchain network that not only carries financial transactions in the world. It should also support social networking, gaming, content, intellectual property, traceability of AI data, transaction flow of AI agents, retail scale applications, digital tokens for mass use, and so on, which are currently not possible. The throughput is not enough, the system cannot support it, and the infrastructure does not have scalability yet. We have currently launched USDC and EURC. I cannot say that we will definitely issue more currencies in the future, but what is certain is that globally, whether in emerging markets or developed countries, stablecoin regulations are gradually being implemented, and we are also seeing more and more high-quality stablecoin projects being launched. I think by 2025, you will see an increasing number of fiat stablecoins such as the Mexican peso, Japanese yen, Australian dollar, and British pound. We sincerely believe that in this era of Internet financial system, the position of the US dollar will only become more and more important, and the US dollar stable currency (USDC) will be the core. So our main focus will definitely be on this. The overall market size of global legal electronic currency is over 100 trillion US dollars. I believe that one subset of the stablecoin market, represented by US dollar stablecoins and Euro stablecoins, will continue to expand regardless of whether interest rates are high or low. What we see now is that the total size of the entire stablecoin is only 160 billion US dollars (recently exceeding 210 billion US dollars), accounting for only 0.16%. This is clearly still in a very early stage. If everything goes smoothly, perhaps in the next 10 to 20 years, we can see 10% of the world's currencies transform into forms like stablecoins. This will take decades, but it will indeed change the world. I couldn't find the original English text, it should be his expression article from a few years ago. Chinese version organized by Rhythm（ https://www.theblockbeats.info/news/58468 ）.