Bankless - Circle's CEO, Jeremy Allaire on USDC, SVB's Collapse, & the U.S. Banking System

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

Co-Founder and CEO of Circle, Jeremy Allaire, answers the question, "What's next for USDC?" It's been a rocky week for the stablecoin. Bottoming out right around $0.88 amidst the U.S. banking crisis, it seems to have regained its peg. What happened behind the scenes? What regulation is needed according to Jeremy? And most importantly, what's next for USDC?   ------ 📣 RhinoFi | Makes DeFi Frictionless  https://bankless.cc/rhino   ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM:  https://www.bankless.com/join  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  👻 PHANTOM | FRIENDLY MULTICHAIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom-waitlist  🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi    ----- Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:52 Update on the Past Week 15:44  Circle's Adapted Strategy  20:32 CBDCs 26:18 What Regulation is Needed? 29:02 Closing & Disclaimers ----- Resources: Jeremy Allaire https://twitter.com/jerallaire  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Bankless Nation, we have a special episode for you today. What is next for USDC? That is the stable coin at the center of much of crypto today. And David, we brought on the perfect guest to give us the scoop and to tell us what's next for USC. And to tell us what happened last week in the crazy weekend where USDC was trading 10 cents off of its peg in the midst of banks melting down all sorts of chaos. So who do we have on today? Jeremy Aller, the CEO and I believe co-founder of Circle, the producers of USDC, probably one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in this defy landscape. It traded all the way down to 88 cents.

I've seen dye trade off of its peg. I've seen other stable coins trade off its peg. I've never seen USC trade off of its peg. So I really just want to get the update. How has Circle reacted to the events of this banking crisis and what has changed for Circle moving forward? And so we're just going to get the update from Jeremy O'Leary. Guys, we're going to get right to the episode with Jeremy. But before we do, we want to speed run the sponsors who made this episode possible.

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making NFTs, swapping tokens, staking tokens. So if you're a multi-chain surfer or an NFT power user than the Phantom wallet is for you. It also comes in mobile. Check it out at phantom. Dot app. Now, let's get into the interview. Bankless Nation, we are joined by Jeremy Laird. He is the CEO and founder of Circle, the company behind USDC. Jeremy, I know things are really busy over there. We appreciate you making the time to update the crypto community and what's going on. How are things? I mean, you feel it okay? It was a pretty crazy weekend last week. And how are things now? It's, you know, it's been really dramatic. And, you know, it wasn't just last week.

I mean, it started as, you know, you saw a bank failure with Silvergate Bank, which, as you know, is a bank that many digital asset firm, crypto firms and others, you know, work with. It's been, you know, I know something you guys have been talking about for a little while, this sort of, you know, bank derisking, like all kinds of impacts of the banking system on crypto. That's been kind of a theme since the start of the year. And then, of course, you know, these sort of systemic financial stability issues that emerged out of nowhere, or seemingly out of nowhere, which, you know, we can talk about whether regulators were asleep at the wheel on that as well. But, you know, it's been a dramatic period of time. And so, you know, we began last week with basically Silvergate shutting down and us having to like decommission rails for lots of companies and a lot of really kind of challenge. challenging situation. And then on Wednesday, we went into a period where it was announced that, you know, Silicon Valley Bank had had significant withdrawals and was needing emergency funding. And

they were saying, we're going to get the emergency funding. And at that point, I think, you know, a lot of a lot of people began to freak out and then ask a question, you know, is there a broader set of risk in commercial banks in the United States, especially kind of mid-sized commercial banks? and you know, you began to see kind of panic emerge and that then manifested itself in, you know, ultimately the closure of multiple banks and the Federal Reserve, you know, stepping in, basically saying we're going to provide $700 billion of liquidity to the commercial banking sector and ensure all uninsured deposits. I think that the real risk was that, you know, the sort of asset and liability management as that kind of imbalance that were really the result of rising interest rates and then essentially banks holding

long bonds and then having liquidity crunches against that, you know, was undermining financial stability. So that's like the macro kind of going into Wednesday in terms of what people are seeing. So for us, pretty dramatic. And I think it's actually worth level setting, you know, before kind of going into that a little bit about the way USC operates, right, which is when we launch USDC, you five years ago, we really wanted to build something that was regulated, that was supervised, and that had, you know, the approval of kind of payments and banking regulators to operate

connected to the banking system. Like the key concept was we need a way to be able to seamlessly, you know, kind of create and redeem dollar digital currency connected to the banking system. And at the time, the regulatory framework for that in the U.S. was basically, you know, what's called stored value electronic money law, which is the same law that governs your PayPal balance, your Venmo balance, cash app, Apple pay, and like every payment processor you use, that's all governed under that, the non-bank payment systems of the United States. And that's a good regime because you're required by law to hold one-for-one redeemability. You have a very narrow set of financial instruments that you're allowed to hold, and that's by law. If you go outside of that,

you're going to lose your licenses, lose your bank accounts, et cetera. And, you know, we, We obviously also wanted to be more transparent. Like if you ask PayPal, you know, what what's in your reserves? Like people don't even think to ask that. There's $35 billion. So what is it? Corporate bonds. What is it?

No one asked that question. But in crypto, everything's public. Everything's transparent. People want to understand risk. And so we began, you know, the whole trend of monthly attestations from public accounting firms and sort of saying, yes, the money's there. Here's how many tokens. That kind of thing.

That I think was sort of the state of play five years ago. And there was really only one bank that would actually provide the capabilities needed to do this, which was Silvergate Bank. That was, you know, and in many ways it was sort of the birth of USDA that then created the basis for Silvergate actually to grow in some ways. Because, you know, people who needed to get in and out of digital dollar liquidity in the form of USDA could do that 24-7 through there. So if you fast forward, as this has scaled out over the past few years, our goal was we just we want to as as one of my colleagues says it's sort of from our perspective it's a race to the top not a race to the bottom and race to the top was like how do we keep increasing transparency how do we keep increasing the quality of the reserves with an ultimate

end state which we've we've stated publicly for years now which is that we believe the base layer of you know kind of dollars on the internet needs to be essentially straight through government an obligation money, meaning it should be cash at the Federal Reserve and it should be, you know, these sort of T bills, these short duration T bills. And that's basically cash or cash equivalency and like a digital cash instrument should do that. Like we shouldn't depend on the, you know, the risks inherent in the fraction reserve banking system to underpin that. Now legally that has, and from a kind of technical and regulatory perspective, that wasn't possible for us. But we've been moving over time as more banks got comfortable with firms like Circle to expand the number of banks

that could hold reserves. We expanded the number of banks that could handle transaction processing with USDC. And there's some big breakthroughs actually kind of, you know, over the last six months and two really noteworthy ones. One was we moved, you know, essentially 80% of the reserves to be exclusively in these short-term T-bills. But we set. set it up in this structure in a strategic partnership with BlackRock. BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world, 11 or 10 trillion-ish assets. And we created something called the Circle Reserve Fund, which basically is an SEC registered and supervised reserve fund. It is a government money fund. It exists exclusively for USDA reserves. And it's held entirely for the benefit of

usDC holders. And that allowed us to basically offer total transparency. So anyone in the world can go any day of the week and look at the USDX ticker. And they can see exactly the portfolio of T-bills, their maturity, et cetera. And so they can see, okay, 80% of this is this highly liquid thing. And it's also independently, it's SEC supervised, it's independently audited. And so that's like part of the race to the top. How do we keep increasing that? Then we have this 20% which is in commercial banks. And, you know, our goal is also a race to the top, race to the top there. We know that sitting inside of that is commercial bank risk.

And so you, you know, you sort of prudently, you look at, okay, we want to have A-rated, publicly traded financial institutions. We want to have, like, the best possible kind of quality there. And, you know, I think our goal over time was, like, how do we get more and more of this at, like, the largest cash custodians in the world? So if we're going to have that, we have that in place. So we actually began work with Bank of New York Mellon, B.NY Mellon. It's like the first, you know, Bank in the United States.

Alexander Hamilton founded it. And they hold $24 trillion of assets. So they're a globally, systemically important bank. And that's important. So we have this relationship developing. And actually, literally, as everything went down last week, we, you know, it was kind of like, okay, it looks like commercial banks more broadly, including banks that we worked with, we're going to fall over.

And so we began the process of basically moving cash into Bank of New York Mellon, right? We want to be the most solid, you know, kind of dollar cash infrastructure in the world. And, you know, we began that process on Thursday and we completed that process on Friday. And in the middle of it, SVB got shut down. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So it's like, okay, we've got $3.3 billion in transit. And it's actually, we can see in the Fedwire system, like the receiving bank, like, is acknowledging, yes, this is incoming.

But the wires, like, stuck. It just hasn't settled on Shane. So it's that pending transaction thing. It hasn't settled on the Fedwire ledger, right? Because someone hit a stop button and said, no, we got to, like, stop the blood from flowing from this bank and figure out what we're going to do. And so, you know, a huge flurry of activity, obviously. We publicly disclosed this because we felt. that USC holders should know.

You know, as soon as we published really disclosed what we knew and the details of what we knew, we re-pegged to 98 cents, which was great. But before that, it was like you said, it was like, people were like, oh, my God, is this over, you know, just like, and, you know, the way these digital asset markets and defy and everything, it just moves at the speed of the internet. And so it's just like that kind of thing. Now, the reality is like the actual risk of that not being fully reserved and available is extremely low. And we, you know, there's only so much you can do to reassure people. And so,

you know, for us, basically, we, you know, we took, we took an incredible number of actions. We also, we were concerned that signature bank was potentially at risk. And so we undertook to do the same thing with signature bank. And in fact, it turned out they were shut down by the end of the weekend. And that was, again, another rail that existed. So a rail for the on and off ramps for creating and redeeming USDC was essentially shuttered as well. And so to open up minting and redemption on Monday morning, we needed to stand up multiple new settlement infrastructures over three days. And we had a lot of that already underway because we were sort of marching towards more and more redundancy given the kind of bank risk issues that exist in the sector. And we were able to come online on Monday and meet our obligations and everything else. And I think, you know, there's a lot of plan A, plan B, plan C type of activities going on, you know, over the weekend. But. The interesting thing is coming out the other side of this is, you know, we certainly have survived this sort of systemic shock. And the lesson that, you know, I don't know if I said this earlier, but it's sort of, you know, we're in this world now where everyone's talking about how we need to save the banks from crypto.

And right now we're trying to save crypto from the banks. And I mean, like quite literally. And so, and I think on the other side of this, though, we're now in a place where USDC is actually. the most secure digital dollar on the internet. We have cash at BNY Mellon and we have the ability to kind of settle through settlement banks, but we have cashed at BNY Mellon. We have the Circle Reserve Fund, SEC supervised with only these T-bills, with daily transparency. It is by far the best, most stable thing out there. And we've had a really positive response from regulators, from others in terms of how we've handled this. But truly extraordinary. And I'm actually, I'm in

London right now and, and, you know, meeting with, happened to be in London. I was able to still go, but, you know, meeting with a lot of major regulators. And, you know, I think this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a real test. It was a really, really major test of a, of a critical infrastructure. And, you know, I'm sure the conversation will lead us into kind of what the future holds for this. No, I think that's exactly right. And it's just hearing this peek into what the strategy of circle behind the scenes is kind of just gives me a little. lot of confidence that you guys really know your shit about stuff, about how. And it really seems like this was a very intentional strategy to allow for optionality in an unknown set of possible crises. And then lo and behold, one day actually arise where a crisis does come. And there seems to be that there was sufficient optionality in Circle's choices that they were able to navigate whatever crisis was thrown your way. So, you know, tip of the hat, when we were watching Circle

the USC trade down to 88 cents. To me, I was like, man, best deal in the world. This is a pan. This is like, even if the worst case scenario about Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank and signature bank happened, like, 88 cents still seems insane. And that seems to be like drawn out in the strategy that you're, you're giving us here, Jeremy. So the question is exactly what you alluded to.

How has the circle strategy adapted now that this new phase change of banking inside of the United States has changed? Like, what's the new strategy? Like, what are the choices that are being made in the Circle War Room? Yeah, I mean, look, there's a bunch of things. So I think the first is we want to make sure that as a dollar market infrastructure on the internet, that everyone understands that the cash reserve is in the safest kind of custodial infrastructure in the world and obviously continue to reinforce what we've already done with T-bills and what that is.

And so that's really key. The next piece, though, is, you know, there's, there's, there's really this need for more banking optionality for the crypto industry. And I think there's been a kind of reconfiguration of risk. And that's come from regulators. It's come from the banks themselves. And so it's really key for us to bring online new settlement banks. So there's sort of the money and transit piece of this, which is, you know, I want to put a wire or a transfer in and I want to get USDC or I want to redeem USD.

It's that settlement layer between, you know, kind of how money moves in and out of the system. We need to, you know, we had redundancy there, which allowed us to be resilient in the face of this. We need to have more redundancy. And that's also because, you know, you know, digital asset firms need more banking options. And so that's a really key piece. And then the other is, you know, we really want to bring that kind of that transit and settlement closer to people around the world. So one of the big things about USDC is it's a digital dollar that people want all around the world. And digital asset markets are highly global, defies, highly global.

And so we want to make sure that if people aren't sitting around waiting for a wire to get to the United States, that, you know, if there's people in Singapore or Hong Kong or Dubai or in London or in Brazil, that or wherever it is, that we can be kind of out on the edges and make sure that we've got really good high quality kind of on and off ramps in more parts of the world. So that's another thing. And that's part of redundancy as well, sort of kind of making sure that you've got a layer for the on and off ramps in as many kind of markets as possible. And I think the bigger piece here, which does have to do with regulation is, you know, what we've been advocating for for years is a way for us to have like a charter that is with the federal government that allows us to hold cash with the Fed, that allows us to have direct access to the core payment systems. and to make sure that this is like the safest, you know, instrument, you know, kind of digital cash instrument,

a dollar digital cash instrument in the world. We really, really believe that's key. And the kinds of risks that we were concerned about are exactly the risks that have emerged. And so, you know, philosophically, like in the founding of the company 10 years ago, I'm a very deep believer in full reserve banking, this idea that we don't need to have fractional reserve banking, that we could have a full reserve banking model where the kind of base layer of money

is this straight through kind of, you know, what I call government obligation money. And the payment system innovation is sort of, you know, built on the internet in this way, in this new software mediated way. And then lending can happen outside of that. People could lend just like happens in defy now. Like if I lend USDC to a lending pool,

like there's no fractional reserve. They can't go create more USC. But if you lend your money to a bank, they actually create more money. They actually fractionally reserve and create more money. And so a full reserve model where lending markets are mediated by software and smart contracts and by, you know, the sort of primitives of defy, that's the future that we'd like to see and have the base layer be as totally safe as possible. You know, Jeremy, this is a, this whole conversation has really opened my eyes to all that circle has been doing and USC has been doing behind the scenes.

So I think the last place I'd left Circle, because there's a lot to pay attention to in crypto, you know, like lots of distractions. Yes, there are so many. The last I left it, it was still kind of, okay, well, Circle probably does the majority of its banking at Silvergate. But behind the scenes, you guys had been upgrading the infrastructure in a massive way to get to a race to the top,

safer and safer strategy. And what's really interesting is like, I'm kind of picturing you, like even last week, at sort of the end stages of, you know, it's like a scene in Indiana Jones where you're, you're running over the bridge and it's like collapsing behind you, right? It's kind of that. But the end result is, um, USC is actually stronger as a result of this. How did that happen? And you fast track that strength, which is so what's really interesting to me is so we started with like, um, let's call Silvergate a no name bank because five years ago it sort of was. You started with

USC only being a, in a in a no name bank. And now here we were even, prior to this crisis where you actually had Black Rock, which is pretty close to like T-Bills. And then you had B&Y Mellon, which is like one of the big cannot fail, does not fail type banks. And I'm sort of wondering, it's like if that's been the trajectory,

now I'm seeing sort of the end state vision. And I'm almost wondering if that end state vision for Circle and USC is something like a proxy central bank digital currency, okay? Like, I know we're steps before that here. And maybe I'm getting too ahead of myself. But it just feels like that vision of like, you shouldn't have commercial bank, I'll call it protocol risk because we have

crypto. It should just be one to one with the T bill. It shouldn't take any risk of the banking sector. Or literally the central bank liability itself, right? Can we just make, can we just, well, my question is. So I see that, you see that. A lot of people in crypto see that. we also see a complete absence of a U.S. Central Bank digital currency strategy, even though they're writing white papers on it all the time. China's like miles ahead of the U.S. They need a strategy. They may not know it yet. Will these events precipitate that conversation? Could it actually move forward in that direction and actually be a kind of a growth catalyst to get us there faster?

I mean, I think so. I mean, like, you know, the interesting thing is like the whole discussion of CBDCs, if you recall, actually emerged because of this project. called Libra, where everyone was like, that was going to be this new global stable coin. And so all the central banks were like, no fucking way. Like, we're like, we're going to do that. We're not going to let Facebook do that. I mean, that was basically it. So then they got really schooled on stable coins. Now, quietly in the background, like, we were grinding away, like getting defy lit up with

USC and all these protocols. And that was 2019. And like, that's when we got real product market fit. And then obviously, as like things took off in 2020, it really, it really grew really fast. And it turned out, like, Libra wasn't. actually the thing. It was actually something like USDC. Now, what's happened since then, though, is like central banks have sort of said, okay, there's a private sector, you know, open technology

innovation model for how this can work. And then there's like, we could go build it ourselves. And mostly now we're in a place where most central banks are like these will, at a minimum, these are going to coexist. And even if they're going to coexist, stablecoins are here and now. So we need to have a regular, we need to have a way to regulate this now. And so, So, you know, like there's a bill that I think will see the light of day very soon in Congress, which is like the Payment Stablecoin Act. And that's the term of art in Washington is a payment stable coin, which is to differentiate it from, say, like a synthetic derivative stable coin that's indogyncially backed by Luna or,

you know, that kind of structure, right? A payment stable coin where it's like a payment token and it can be used to settle a payment obligation as good as cash. the payment stable coin legislation essentially creates a pathway for private sector actors to have a formal recognition at the federal level and be connected to the Federal Reserve Bank. But instead of depending on the government to build technology and innovate, you're depending on public internet infrastructure, public blockchain infrastructure, the crowdsourced open source development that has given growth to the entire internet. And you're doing that and you're allowing that

kind of that level of innovation, which is constantly obsolescing itself. And you're, you're enabling, you know, kind of technology-driven software-powered intermediaries to drive the development of that. That's the vision. And I think we're much closer to that now. And I think it's much more likely that if these incidents actually, you know, the, the, the regulators say, yeah, we don't want these staplains to tip over when there's commercial bank failures. You actually get to that point where you have a higher quality reserve and you've got good supervision because I think if we're going to be a market infrastructure, a dollar market infrastructure that tons of people in the world depends on, we should be supervised. Like,

we should be very, very heavily supervised to make sure we're not doing crazy, badass, you know, stuff. And, but, and, you know, if you get there and you get things like account abstraction and layer twos and all the things that are happening, you can create a user experience that actually could work for billions of people. And so I actually think we're like two, three years away from having at scale, you know, a regulated model of this that can work at internet scale and work for users. And that's going to happen way faster than a central bank digital currency. That has the potential to happen at kind of internet speed and internet scale. So Jeremy, I guess as we close, and I know you're very busy and you have to leave, but this has been fantastic. I've learned

a tremendous amount during this conversation. I'm curious, we're having a conversation a little bit later today with Hester Purse from the SEC. And of course, it feels like coming to 2023, crypto has never faced more regulatory headwinds. Like it feels like coming out of 2022, there's a lot of resistance. And it's not clear to me yet how politicians and lawmakers will react on the bank of this bank crisis. Right. We said, you know, the banks failed crypto rather than crypto failing the banks. Is this what the narrative will say? Is this what the politicians will say or will they point to crypto and aim for a scapegoat. That to me is still unclear. But let me ask you, maybe this is a question that we can relate to some of our regulatory

conversations. What regulation do you need? What do you need most from Congress or lawmakers, those that are governing this country in order to accelerate the plan that you talked about? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, what we need is is a bill that I think, as a as of late last year when Congress was turning over, was kind of 80 or 90% complete, which is what we refer to as the Mick Waters bill, which is the co-chairs of the House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman at the time, Waters and Patrick McHenry

worked really, really closely on a bipartisan bill for stable coins that would basically create this pathway for a kind of federally registered firm. So you're not dealing with the, patchwork of all these states and you're up leveling and sort of a race to the top set of standards and give firms like Circle the ability to have the safest foundation in terms of the backing and payment system access and make that, you know, a model legislation that allows the dollar to be the most competitive currency on the internet and to, you know, give the U.S. a chance to

kind of, as we like to say, win the digital currency space race. So that's what's needed. So I think Congress has an opportunity right now. It's going to start in the House Financial Services Committee. They have an opportunity to put something forward. And I think, you know, there's a real shot at that. So that's what we need is we need to see that. And that will also create the basis for tons of other companies to feel comfortable getting into this industry. I think that's been a huge barrier. It's not having that clarity. And that's both competitively in the stable coin industry, as well as in being involved with using this as a technology for other pieces of finance and commerce. So we really need to see something like that emerge.

Well, Jeremy, I know you've probably had one of the perhaps most memorable weekends of your life in this last weekend. And this has really turned into this theme of the bear market is that we've got a lot of cleanup to do as a result of perhaps some of the short-termerism that we saw in this bull market in 2021 and 22. So thank you for sticking around and fighting when times go tough. And thank you for being quick to adapt when the time came to do that over at Circle. So just thank you for everything you're doing and providing just the infrastructure that we need to move this industry forward. You're welcome. It's great to be on here and look forward to coming on again as all this evolves. This is fast moving and you guys are doing a great job carrying out the conversation with, I think, all the right people.

on all the right topics. So great to be able to join you today. Amazing. Well, Bankless Nation, there you go. Got to end with our usual risks and disclaimers like we always do. None of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. But banks are too, aren't they when you think about it? You can definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.