WEBVTT 1 00:00:02.363 --> 00:00:03.844 Bankless Nation, I am with Nikhil. 2 00:00:03.864 --> 00:00:07.086 He is the Chief Product and Technology Officer over at Circle. 3 00:00:07.306 --> 00:00:09.748 And coming out of Circle, we've got a pretty big announcement. 4 00:00:09.768 --> 00:00:11.709 Nikhil, today is the day. 5 00:00:12.029 --> 00:00:13.530 Tell me about what day this is. 6 00:00:13.790 --> 00:00:16.332 Today is the day of our launch. 7 00:00:16.352 --> 00:00:18.933 We're launching our mainnet. 8 00:00:19.233 --> 00:00:20.694 We've been working on it for years. 9 00:00:20.774 --> 00:00:22.355 We're very proud of the launch today. 10 00:00:22.415 --> 00:00:25.617 So it's the first day of a very long journey for us. 11 00:00:25.637 --> 00:00:26.698 So very excited to be here. 12 00:00:26.798 --> 00:00:28.199 Well, congratulations on mainnet day. 13 00:00:28.219 --> 00:00:29.279 That's always a very special day. 14 00:00:29.639 --> 00:00:33.061 Talk to me about what make ARK unique. 15 00:00:33.121 --> 00:00:34.401 Like, what are the special properties? 16 00:00:34.421 --> 00:00:36.983 What are the unique properties that ARK is bringing to the table? 17 00:00:37.203 --> 00:00:37.883 Right. 18 00:00:38.043 --> 00:00:42.905 I think it's useful to step back and talk about Circle a little bit. 19 00:00:42.945 --> 00:00:46.487 Like, Circle started off as a stablecoin issuer. 20 00:00:47.487 --> 00:00:47.727 And... 21 00:00:49.308 --> 00:00:52.172 and build what is now the largest regulated stablecoin. 22 00:00:53.974 --> 00:01:05.888 ARK is taking that idea of like building regulated financial infrastructure that bridges like what is traditional financial institutions and all this new innovation. 23 00:01:06.809 --> 00:01:11.472 and takes that idea forward and brings it to the local, brings it to an L1 layer. 24 00:01:12.393 --> 00:01:15.895 So the core features of ARK are things that people may have heard about already. 25 00:01:16.115 --> 00:01:26.722 Like this is, we have something called, we have something called payment finality, which allows for transactions to be truly final within, once they are settled. 26 00:01:27.942 --> 00:01:38.065 settlement time is half a second, which allows for minimizing risk along with the payment finality and like allowing you to do like rapid transactions on the network. 27 00:01:38.845 --> 00:01:42.446 Gas is in stable coins starting with USDC. 28 00:01:42.466 --> 00:01:44.746 So you don't have to hold a native network token. 29 00:01:45.046 --> 00:01:47.847 While for crypto users, this may feel like a small feature 30 00:01:48.527 --> 00:02:02.695 For companies that are transacting, that are holding treasuries, that are transacting in RWAs, this is a very significant hurdle to cross because they don't know how to account for things like native network tokens. 31 00:02:02.755 --> 00:02:10.620 And so not only do they have to hold inventory of native network tokens, but they also don't know how to count those native network tokens on their books. 32 00:02:10.660 --> 00:02:11.941 So that's a pretty big deal. 33 00:02:13.302 --> 00:02:19.027 We have other things that are launching that are like really unique for a blockchain that sort of speak to our full stack nature. 34 00:02:19.047 --> 00:02:28.175 We have Arc Studio, which allows you to sort of talk to an AI and deploy a custom contract, which is how we think like all financial arrangements in the future will happen. 35 00:02:29.215 --> 00:02:35.341 We have we have our kits, which allow you to build like custom apps on site on top of Arc. 36 00:02:35.921 --> 00:02:36.162 So. 37 00:02:36.862 --> 00:02:41.663 We've not treated this as just a network launch, but we've treated it as a full stack. 38 00:02:41.723 --> 00:02:43.864 Like, hey, you want to build a financial application today. 39 00:02:43.984 --> 00:02:44.904 How do you get started? 40 00:02:45.305 --> 00:02:46.565 What are all the primitives you need? 41 00:02:46.725 --> 00:02:53.067 All the way down from the network layer, all the way to the top being the application layer. 42 00:02:53.107 --> 00:02:54.747 So that's what's unique about us. 43 00:02:54.787 --> 00:02:57.008 I mean, and we're really excited to get it on. 44 00:02:57.328 --> 00:03:02.432 I do want to zoom in and expand that tech stack and talk about the different components. 45 00:03:02.812 --> 00:03:10.639 But if we were to collapse the tech stack and really summate everything, how would you meme, memify our chain? 46 00:03:10.719 --> 00:03:12.600 So, you know, Bitcoin is hard money. 47 00:03:12.620 --> 00:03:16.944 You know, Ethereum's North Star is like decentralization, permissionlessness. 48 00:03:17.704 --> 00:03:20.987 Solana is Nasdaq on the blockchain. 49 00:03:21.707 --> 00:03:23.568 What's the meme for ARK? 50 00:03:23.588 --> 00:03:24.969 What is your guys' North Star? 51 00:03:25.129 --> 00:03:28.872 How would you collapse everything you guys are doing into a simple idea? 52 00:03:29.112 --> 00:03:30.733 I mean, we've called it economic OS. 53 00:03:31.234 --> 00:03:39.059 And when we say economic OS, we think about things that went like, I mean, I grew up when phones came about and... 54 00:03:40.340 --> 00:03:46.564 When phones came about, like when Android came about at Google, I was there and there were six plus operating systems in the market at that time. 55 00:03:46.765 --> 00:03:50.427 So it wasn't clear you needed another OS in the market. 56 00:03:50.487 --> 00:03:55.591 And what Google did uniquely was it said like, we have a problem that we have to solve for chip makers. 57 00:03:55.791 --> 00:03:57.932 There's a problem that we have to solve for handset makers. 58 00:03:57.992 --> 00:04:01.855 We have to solve a problem for developers and we have to solve a problem for users. 59 00:04:02.355 --> 00:04:08.020 And if we solve all of those problems together, we will have a very successful operating system. 60 00:04:08.100 --> 00:04:13.665 And other operating systems in the past had taken like a sliver of the market and solved the problems for that sliver of the market. 61 00:04:14.385 --> 00:04:20.771 So when we think about ARC and we think about building an economic OS, we're thinking about solving the full stack of problems. 62 00:04:20.931 --> 00:04:22.592 I want to solve application level problems. 63 00:04:22.652 --> 00:04:33.739 So like problems like sign this transaction or sign multiple transactions, do something as simple as sending USDC from one wallet to the other should not be a thing that users have to deal with, right? 64 00:04:34.039 --> 00:04:36.221 Users should not have to think about things like gas. 65 00:04:36.361 --> 00:04:37.161 Like what is gas? 66 00:04:37.241 --> 00:04:38.722 It's a very complicated concept. 67 00:04:39.103 --> 00:04:40.143 Engineers understand it. 68 00:04:40.263 --> 00:04:41.444 Crypto users understand it. 69 00:04:41.524 --> 00:04:50.470 But like if you believe 5 billion users who are on phones today are going to be using this financial infrastructure, then I don't think we can explain gas to them. 70 00:04:50.930 --> 00:04:52.871 we need to be able to explain local money to them. 71 00:04:52.911 --> 00:04:56.952 So we have 16-ish stable coins launching on ARK today. 72 00:04:57.713 --> 00:05:04.915 And we want to make sure that like users are able to interact with like the blockchain infrastructure using the currencies that they fully understand. 73 00:05:05.375 --> 00:05:09.637 They don't have to use Bitcoin or Ethereum or any other chain for that matter. 74 00:05:10.157 --> 00:05:13.718 So I think it is like economic OS, like it's less of a meme. 75 00:05:13.778 --> 00:05:17.159 I know it's a little more nerdy than what a meme could be. 76 00:05:17.999 --> 00:05:23.421 Maybe a meme will emerge that'll like sort of sum up what an economic OS could be. 77 00:05:24.561 --> 00:05:26.322 But yeah, I mean, like it's only day one. 78 00:05:26.362 --> 00:05:29.403 So I'm very hopeful that the internet will deliver. 79 00:05:29.663 --> 00:05:33.126 Let's do just a little bit of the homework that we need to do to understand ARK. 80 00:05:33.306 --> 00:05:43.655 What are the technical properties that like crypto natives, the hardcore crypto natives that want to like pop open the hood and compare ARK to our frame of reference, which is like Ethereum, for example. 81 00:05:43.955 --> 00:05:47.078 So ARK has a validator set. 82 00:05:47.759 --> 00:05:50.641 There's some parts of the validator set that are permissioned. 83 00:05:50.701 --> 00:05:57.047 Maybe you can talk about just like the basics of the protocol and how that like diverges from what the standard is. 84 00:05:57.267 --> 00:05:57.507 Yeah. 85 00:05:57.627 --> 00:06:02.271 So the validator set is permission and we can get into why it is permission if you have to. 86 00:06:02.752 --> 00:06:05.094 But the deployment of contracts is not permission. 87 00:06:05.414 --> 00:06:06.815 Like so anybody can come deploy. 88 00:06:06.955 --> 00:06:08.517 You don't need a developer key from us. 89 00:06:08.557 --> 00:06:10.739 You don't need like you don't need to sign up a circle. 90 00:06:11.559 --> 00:06:14.402 So in that way, it is very much permissionless deployment. 91 00:06:15.322 --> 00:06:18.405 We don't we don't control like what contracts you interact with. 92 00:06:18.445 --> 00:06:20.467 We don't control what chains you interact with. 93 00:06:20.487 --> 00:06:22.529 Like it is truly permissionless infrastructure. 94 00:06:23.129 --> 00:06:36.243 It is a permission validator set because for the kind of traffic that we're hoping to get in addition to like core internet crypto traffic or the new kind of traffic that we want to get, those users want to know who the validators are. 95 00:06:36.484 --> 00:06:39.006 They cannot rely on unknown validators today 96 00:06:39.727 --> 00:06:46.030 And we do believe we are at the early stages of getting this institutional traffic onto the chain. 97 00:06:46.670 --> 00:06:48.911 And so that's why we have a permission validator set. 98 00:06:49.111 --> 00:06:52.353 And it makes getting that traffic easier. 99 00:06:52.873 --> 00:07:01.417 So going back to the questions of what else is unique about the chain technically, we announced that we're going to be doing post-quantum signatures. 100 00:07:02.497 --> 00:07:04.618 It should launch in beta. 101 00:07:06.219 --> 00:07:06.799 very soon. 102 00:07:08.080 --> 00:07:15.324 And that'll allow for post-quantum signatures, like, you know, essentially wallets can enforce like post-quantum signatures. 103 00:07:15.564 --> 00:07:17.145 Other things, our privacy sector. 104 00:07:17.465 --> 00:07:21.828 So like we've talked about privacy for a long time on chains. 105 00:07:22.688 --> 00:07:24.670 Current privacy solutions are klugey. 106 00:07:25.210 --> 00:07:30.033 And when I say klugey, as in like average user who's using a wallet is either giving up self-custody 107 00:07:30.773 --> 00:07:34.957 or is taking on significant financial risk when they're like engaging in privacy. 108 00:07:35.337 --> 00:07:43.664 What we want to do is do something as simple as like you toggle a switch and you can take a transaction that was going to be a public transaction and make it a private transaction. 109 00:07:43.684 --> 00:07:47.327 So you can have a mix of both public and private transactions using the same wallet interface. 110 00:07:47.987 --> 00:07:49.528 That's unique. 111 00:07:50.009 --> 00:07:55.514 There's other stuff under the hood that makes it possible for us to achieve the sub-second finality. 112 00:07:55.534 --> 00:07:56.615 We have a new consensus layer. 113 00:07:56.635 --> 00:07:57.596 We've already talked about it. 114 00:07:58.376 --> 00:08:02.220 We acquired this company to get the Malachite consensus layer. 115 00:08:03.681 --> 00:08:10.788 All of these things together sort of build what is sort of unique about ARC from a technical perspective. 116 00:08:11.568 --> 00:08:13.270 Uh, there's going to be new innovation as well. 117 00:08:13.310 --> 00:08:27.267 Like we're going to be looking at other custom sectors for specific type of traffic, whether it's agent traffic, whether it's payments traffic, uh, so that we can have like fast transactions for these new economic actors, like agents that are emerging, but that is still a work in progress. 118 00:08:27.647 --> 00:08:27.887 I see. 119 00:08:28.749 --> 00:08:31.713 Since you brought up privacy, let's just dive into that part. 120 00:08:31.753 --> 00:08:34.797 You said that there are public transactions and private transactions. 121 00:08:35.098 --> 00:08:38.382 Feels pattern-wise similar to Zcash. 122 00:08:38.422 --> 00:08:41.807 You have shielded Zcash, you have unshielded Zcash. 123 00:08:42.548 --> 00:08:44.529 Is the privacy on ARK complete? 124 00:08:44.769 --> 00:08:59.199 Like does ARK and the validators, are they able to kind of backdoor the privacy or is the privacy actually like as strong, for example, as something like Zcash, where if it is private, it is truly locked down and private. 125 00:08:59.479 --> 00:09:02.861 How would you qualify the level of privacy that you get on ARK? 126 00:09:03.101 --> 00:09:07.144 I'm not an expert on Zcash, even though I use Zcash plenty. 127 00:09:07.965 --> 00:09:08.045 Um, 128 00:09:09.311 --> 00:09:14.034 I will say, I will answer the specific question, which is like, validators are not going to be able to look at your transactions. 129 00:09:14.214 --> 00:09:16.696 That is not a thing that we want. 130 00:09:16.856 --> 00:09:22.860 That defeats the purpose of having privacy. 131 00:09:22.980 --> 00:09:32.967 Like, the whole notion, the whole, all private transactions essentially run through TEs, which is a trusted execution layer, and nobody is able to look inside those. 132 00:09:33.007 --> 00:09:34.988 I mean, Circle cannot look inside those transactions. 133 00:09:35.008 --> 00:09:38.811 So, like, when I say privacy, it is true privacy, and 134 00:09:39.651 --> 00:09:45.375 financial transactions is just day one of like what we think like these things can enable. 135 00:09:45.996 --> 00:09:48.057 I am looking forward to other kinds of applications. 136 00:09:48.137 --> 00:09:53.280 Like one of my favorite applications is sort of medical applications. 137 00:09:53.981 --> 00:10:00.805 I'm sure everybody has this experience in their family where they have some medical data about that they're like talking to a GPT about. 138 00:10:01.666 --> 00:10:01.786 And 139 00:10:03.587 --> 00:10:04.788 And there is some risk in that. 140 00:10:04.888 --> 00:10:12.814 It's not like risk-free in that, like you will leak that, the GPT might leak that information to weather itself or to others. 141 00:10:13.394 --> 00:10:25.843 And so one application I'm really looking forward to is essentially being able to fire up like a custom VM that has a GPT and all of my health data being privately encrypted. 142 00:10:26.523 --> 00:10:35.031 And me being able to ask questions in privacy and at the end of it, being able to destroy that VM and essentially get the answers I need and have all of the data encrypted and stored on chain. 143 00:10:35.612 --> 00:10:38.014 So that is not possible. 144 00:10:38.174 --> 00:10:42.598 And so and instead, what I have to do is like I sign up for stuff I don't fully understand. 145 00:10:42.698 --> 00:10:43.639 I give it information. 146 00:10:43.659 --> 00:10:46.902 I don't I have to just trust them as to what they're going to do with my information. 147 00:10:47.442 --> 00:10:49.384 So privacy is just the beginning. 148 00:10:49.444 --> 00:10:55.610 Privacy is, in my mind, a property of verifiable compute in many ways. 149 00:10:55.630 --> 00:10:58.693 You are telling me that this transaction is going to be private. 150 00:10:58.933 --> 00:11:02.696 But there are many things in verifiable compute that are here yet to come. 151 00:11:03.297 --> 00:11:12.806 And I think blockchains and ARC can play a key role as we evolve this core computing architecture that we have come to rely on for the internet. 152 00:11:13.126 --> 00:11:21.155 And just to make sure I understand the answer, the trust assumption for privacy on ARC is via TEEs. 153 00:11:21.195 --> 00:11:22.897 That is how ARC achieves privacy. 154 00:11:23.237 --> 00:11:24.298 That is the trust assumption. 155 00:11:24.459 --> 00:11:25.840 We have an ARC privacy sector. 156 00:11:26.181 --> 00:11:28.163 We talk about it in the white paper, essentially. 157 00:11:28.543 --> 00:11:28.984 Right. 158 00:11:29.044 --> 00:11:31.587 No one can look inside a TEE except for the manufacturer. 159 00:11:32.852 --> 00:11:34.053 manufacturers probably not doing that. 160 00:11:35.154 --> 00:11:43.238 Is there a plan to evolve the privacy to something like, like straight cryptography or are we satisfied with like the TEE as the trust assumption? 161 00:11:43.439 --> 00:11:50.603 For now, I think we're satisfied with the TEE as the trust assumption because we also have like performance constraints that we want to implement. 162 00:11:51.003 --> 00:11:51.123 Yeah. 163 00:11:51.143 --> 00:11:53.265 And that is one of the features of a known validator set. 164 00:11:53.285 --> 00:11:55.966 Like we know what the TEEs are, where they're running. 165 00:11:55.986 --> 00:11:56.947 And, 166 00:11:58.948 --> 00:12:03.069 That doesn't mean that you cannot engage in like private cryptographic transactions. 167 00:12:03.149 --> 00:12:11.392 Like that is a thing that we have post-quantum signatures that we, that like I said, like we're going to go into beta with. 168 00:12:12.012 --> 00:12:16.453 Those are private, like those are, you can engage in other kinds of cryptography on the platform. 169 00:12:16.534 --> 00:12:24.556 Like for the purposes of like entering into a private send receive between you and I, yes, we have a TE based architecture. 170 00:12:24.832 --> 00:12:26.433 I want to learn about immutability. 171 00:12:26.833 --> 00:12:37.621 Say I am a user on the ARC chain and I mess something up and I've lost a meaningful amount of USDC, $10,000, $100,000. 172 00:12:38.441 --> 00:12:46.967 And I'm actually also in this scenario able to prove to you that that USDC is like actually gone, locked, frozen, burnt, whatever. 173 00:12:47.668 --> 00:12:49.809 Am I able to get my money back in any particular way? 174 00:12:50.029 --> 00:12:52.031 What's ARC's relationship with immutability? 175 00:12:52.051 --> 00:12:52.231 Yeah. 176 00:12:53.533 --> 00:12:54.414 it is all immutable. 177 00:12:55.035 --> 00:12:58.481 Like it is not like, it is like any other blockchain. 178 00:12:58.741 --> 00:13:04.511 Like unfortunately or fortunately, like I think there's pros and cons to immutability. 179 00:13:04.571 --> 00:13:05.953 What you're describing is a con. 180 00:13:09.405 --> 00:13:13.967 I'm not interested in rolling back the chain for, for anything. 181 00:13:13.987 --> 00:13:18.949 Like, unless there's like a rolling back, the chain is not a property, is not a property of the chain, right? 182 00:13:18.969 --> 00:13:25.011 Like it is not like it is, it is, uh, it is such a significant event, uh, to do that. 183 00:13:25.732 --> 00:13:25.972 Um, um, 184 00:13:27.218 --> 00:13:38.845 I think users should be careful about like the USDC that they're using or for that matter, any token contract that they're interacting with on ARK, much like they would be careful about interacting with those token contracts elsewhere. 185 00:13:40.866 --> 00:13:45.729 We don't have any special powers like essentially over here, like change the course of the transactions. 186 00:13:46.121 --> 00:13:54.166 There's like this, this rite of passage that all successful blockchains go through when they are sufficiently successful. 187 00:13:54.786 --> 00:13:57.008 And it's the, it's the Lazarus event. 188 00:13:57.388 --> 00:13:59.149 So ARK wants to be successful. 189 00:13:59.269 --> 00:14:00.390 I want you guys to be accessible. 190 00:14:00.470 --> 00:14:04.072 I want you guys to have billions and billions upon TVL. 191 00:14:04.472 --> 00:14:07.234 Your success is going to attract Lazarus group. 192 00:14:07.594 --> 00:14:08.935 Lazarus group is pretty successful. 193 00:14:09.435 --> 00:14:13.137 They might get away with something, uh, and they might get away with something large. 194 00:14:13.778 --> 00:14:13.998 Um, um, 195 00:14:16.138 --> 00:14:25.481 What do you think about when you think about the potential future event of like the Lazarus group extracting a million plus dollars out of our chain? 196 00:14:25.501 --> 00:14:27.521 Have you guys discussed this possibility? 197 00:14:28.101 --> 00:14:30.902 What comes to mind when I put these words in your brain? 198 00:14:30.922 --> 00:14:32.903 I mean, look, security is a key concern. 199 00:14:32.923 --> 00:14:35.043 Like we are focused. 200 00:14:36.703 --> 00:14:41.805 We are very focused on like making sure that the chain is secure. 201 00:14:41.845 --> 00:14:42.685 We're running audits. 202 00:14:44.485 --> 00:14:45.066 24-7. 203 00:14:47.588 --> 00:14:49.170 I think I mean more in the app layer. 204 00:14:49.270 --> 00:14:56.096 Like, say, Aave, for example, gets implemented or some lending protocol gets implemented and they get exploited by Lazarus Group. 205 00:14:56.176 --> 00:15:00.761 And Lazarus Group has tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of USDC. 206 00:15:01.168 --> 00:15:12.170 I don't want to speculate on like the specific scenario and like, you know, I don't know what's going into like, you know, this, this sort of security violation, but I'll say, what I'll say is like the simple principle is it is an immutable chain. 207 00:15:12.850 --> 00:15:14.191 It is public infrastructure. 208 00:15:14.491 --> 00:15:15.971 There are 20 plus validators. 209 00:15:16.031 --> 00:15:24.193 Like it's an immutable chain where we are, we're running public financial infrastructure and we want to, 210 00:15:25.273 --> 00:15:27.154 do that in good faith, right? 211 00:15:27.174 --> 00:15:29.414 So like, I don't know what the specific scenario is. 212 00:15:29.454 --> 00:15:35.176 And I think there are a lot of such scenarios and there are a lot of different like input conditions that go into like the evaluation of the scenario. 213 00:15:35.256 --> 00:15:43.498 So like, I don't want to speculate on like how we will handle it, but at least the principle, which like going into it is like, look, it's an immutable chain. 214 00:15:43.538 --> 00:15:50.040 We want to make sure that it is, it follows the properties of other immutable chains that are on the public internet. 215 00:15:50.900 --> 00:15:58.204 And I think if you break that, I think you break trust at a level that like, I think people will have a hard time like sort of like establishing the trust again. 216 00:15:58.284 --> 00:16:01.525 So, but we want to be responsible actors in the market. 217 00:16:01.545 --> 00:16:04.527 We want to make sure that like our chains are secure, our apps are secure. 218 00:16:05.107 --> 00:16:14.672 We want to give like security services offering to like, we want to make sure that like people who are deploying are like know the chains sufficiently that they're not deploying like insecure apps on the chain. 219 00:16:14.892 --> 00:16:20.097 Let's talk about what activity is going to be early in the ARC ecosystem. 220 00:16:20.198 --> 00:16:27.265 So there are some of the usual suspects that we would see coming online with an EVM layer one. 221 00:16:27.365 --> 00:16:31.930 I would expect to see a Uniswap, an AMM come online, something like Aave. 222 00:16:32.550 --> 00:16:34.651 So talk to me about what the usual suspects are. 223 00:16:34.811 --> 00:16:47.656 And then also I want to hear about the unusual suspects, the new partners, the new economic activity that hasn't been found elsewhere in the ecosystem that you are hoping to see come to ARK in its early days. 224 00:16:47.676 --> 00:16:50.197 So talk to me about the usual and also the unusual suspects. 225 00:16:50.337 --> 00:16:50.457 Yeah. 226 00:16:50.477 --> 00:16:54.641 I mean, I think the usual suspects are like the borderline protocols are the AMMs. 227 00:16:54.901 --> 00:16:59.785 It's all the exchanges that are like, uh, all the big crypto exchanges that are in the market. 228 00:17:00.346 --> 00:17:13.157 Um, we have the unusual suspects are, um, I guess the large asset issuers, like they are, they have dipped their toes, but I expect them to be more prolific, uh, on ARK than they have been elsewhere. 229 00:17:13.177 --> 00:17:13.237 Um, 230 00:17:14.478 --> 00:17:23.645 Stable FX, which I've talked about, which is like our foray into making sure that blockchains work not just for US dollars, but also work for other currencies around the world. 231 00:17:24.806 --> 00:17:28.169 And then there's a bunch of like agentic activity like we have like, you know, 232 00:17:29.550 --> 00:17:32.672 We have a whole agent stack that we've issued today. 233 00:17:33.952 --> 00:17:47.239 We are in the process of like issuing, creating more like agent primitives that allow for agents to prove provenance, agents to prove what they have done in the past, like essentially being able to prove history. 234 00:17:48.359 --> 00:17:56.384 And so I'm expecting more of that activity, like, you know, and it'll probably be around things that are like native to blockchains, which is trading and such. 235 00:17:56.444 --> 00:17:58.665 Like I think a lot of these agents will do that. 236 00:17:59.405 --> 00:18:02.526 So I am expecting a ton of like credit activity to happen. 237 00:18:02.946 --> 00:18:06.228 And one of the things I'm excited about is agent credit activity. 238 00:18:06.268 --> 00:18:12.190 Like, you know, you start up an agent, you get a little loan, and then you go out and like make a little money, and then you pay the loan back. 239 00:18:12.350 --> 00:18:15.171 And then you sort of spend this, I mean, looping will take a whole new meaning. 240 00:18:16.092 --> 00:18:21.054 Once this, like once these credit markets start functioning on ARK and elsewhere. 241 00:18:22.094 --> 00:18:23.896 And so I think that will be new. 242 00:18:25.797 --> 00:18:27.018 What else? 243 00:18:27.418 --> 00:18:30.421 And there's all, I mean, look, it's a public chain. 244 00:18:31.041 --> 00:18:35.705 It is fully connected to all of the other 35 chains where USDC is. 245 00:18:35.805 --> 00:18:36.866 It has deep connectivity. 246 00:18:37.566 --> 00:18:40.528 It has the ability to bridge any asset to any chain. 247 00:18:41.649 --> 00:18:47.193 And so I'm expecting meme coin activity to, like, you know, what I call, like, you know, culture apps. 248 00:18:48.174 --> 00:18:52.517 They, like, memes are not, like, some part of the internet, like, frowns on memes. 249 00:18:53.377 --> 00:18:55.179 I think memes essentially create culture. 250 00:18:55.219 --> 00:18:58.781 Like, culture used to begin elsewhere, but now culture begins on the internet. 251 00:18:59.262 --> 00:19:01.123 And so I expect a ton of that activity as well. 252 00:19:01.163 --> 00:19:03.004 And, like, we welcome all kinds of activity. 253 00:19:03.044 --> 00:19:04.926 Like, you know, the internet is not just for, 254 00:19:05.846 --> 00:19:11.008 sending emails or doing video calls or like doing banking information. 255 00:19:11.048 --> 00:19:15.550 And the internet doesn't split up the traffic saying like, well, this part of the internet is just for banking. 256 00:19:15.690 --> 00:19:18.011 This part of the internet is just for playing games. 257 00:19:18.071 --> 00:19:19.611 We want to make sure that everything is possible. 258 00:19:19.771 --> 00:19:31.236 As new layer ones have come online, we've seen layer one teams really make like venture style bets on a specific type of activity, a specific type of app, like, you know, 259 00:19:31.936 --> 00:19:41.143 If you guys want, you can go toe-to-toe with Ethereum on borrow and lending inside of Aave or, you know, AMM swaps inside of Uniswap. 260 00:19:41.503 --> 00:19:44.225 I don't know if that's where you guys are going to be the most successful. 261 00:19:44.285 --> 00:19:46.487 It's kind of like table stakes to have it, but I don't know if 262 00:19:46.987 --> 00:19:52.149 ARK is ever going to beat Ethereum on Ethereum's slow DeFi near monopoly. 263 00:19:52.629 --> 00:19:54.670 So what are some of the venture-style bets? 264 00:19:54.690 --> 00:20:05.773 I think you mentioned agents a bunch of times, but what are going to be the activities on ARK that you guys are betting on that bring 1 billion transactions to ARK soon? 265 00:20:05.813 --> 00:20:09.315 So what are the new activities that you guys are betting on? 266 00:20:09.335 --> 00:20:14.416 I think, yeah, first I'd say, Ethereum is the granddaddy of everybody, right? 267 00:20:14.436 --> 00:20:15.657 So we are not here to, 268 00:20:16.377 --> 00:20:21.839 Like, I think if all we did was we took activity from Ethereum and moved it to ARK, we didn't really grow the market. 269 00:20:21.879 --> 00:20:25.260 Like, you know, it doesn't really help our business because we are the largest. 270 00:20:25.620 --> 00:20:30.141 USDC has the biggest chain for USDC is Ethereum. 271 00:20:30.801 --> 00:20:36.963 And so, like, one of our interests in, like, getting ARK out is to make sure that, like, USDC, like, gets benefit from ARK. 272 00:20:36.983 --> 00:20:43.025 And if all we're doing is moving, you know, like, deployment of USDC from Ethereum to ARK, like, it's not... 273 00:20:43.865 --> 00:20:44.966 And we don't grow the market. 274 00:20:44.986 --> 00:20:47.607 That's not really exciting to us. 275 00:20:48.147 --> 00:20:49.088 So that's one. 276 00:20:50.248 --> 00:20:54.270 Second, I'd say it's like, yeah, I do think like the agentic activity is going to pick up. 277 00:20:54.410 --> 00:20:57.532 Like agents should become like independent economic actors. 278 00:20:57.732 --> 00:20:59.372 Today, all the agents are sort of private. 279 00:20:59.512 --> 00:21:01.553 Like I can't share my agent with you very easily. 280 00:21:01.593 --> 00:21:03.934 Like I share a skills.md file. 281 00:21:04.375 --> 00:21:08.797 You run it through your agent VM and you're able to sort of like fire up the same agent. 282 00:21:08.817 --> 00:21:10.938 And even then you're not getting the same guarantees I have. 283 00:21:11.638 --> 00:21:14.179 I do think like these agents will become economic actors. 284 00:21:14.239 --> 00:21:16.460 They will sort of present themselves on the internet. 285 00:21:16.580 --> 00:21:20.382 They will have to prove that they have done a certain amount of activity. 286 00:21:20.902 --> 00:21:24.324 The question is like, how are you going to come to rely on the proofs that the agents are presenting? 287 00:21:24.424 --> 00:21:25.964 I think they have to be cryptographic proofs. 288 00:21:26.244 --> 00:21:33.508 So we will be a home for these agents where they can actually record their activity, provide proofs around around the activity. 289 00:21:34.648 --> 00:21:44.498 what agents do in the next three or four years will be no different than like what websites did like 20 years ago, like 20, 25 years ago, websites were HTTP. 290 00:21:44.538 --> 00:21:45.539 They were not secure. 291 00:21:45.939 --> 00:21:53.347 You could go on like, you know, you could have all kinds of attacks, man in the middle attacks, like, and you wouldn't even know if you're talking to the website that you think you're talking to. 292 00:21:53.707 --> 00:21:56.290 Like all of that gets, all of that got solved by like, 293 00:21:56.870 --> 00:22:06.737 new protocol layers, like new actors coming and giving certificates to websites and like, and making sure that you were actually in, your browser was truly talking to the website that you thought you were talking to. 294 00:22:07.457 --> 00:22:09.179 I think agents will have a higher bar. 295 00:22:09.399 --> 00:22:19.045 It's not just that you're talking to the agent that you think you're talking to, but the agent actually has a work history, has like, has the economic output that they claim that they have actually done. 296 00:22:19.065 --> 00:22:20.386 So how are you going to verify all of that? 297 00:22:21.047 --> 00:22:22.328 All of that should move to ARC. 298 00:22:23.108 --> 00:22:49.828 And if you make payments really easy, especially for nested agents, if I'm an agent and I have a policy and I want to fire off another thousand agents and I want to give those thousand agents a wallet and a policy and some money, and those thousand agents can essentially like transact with each other and not, and for the fire of other agents, we keep sort of like reasoning about it, reasoning about this in terms of like how nested the activity gets and how connected the activity gets. 299 00:22:49.848 --> 00:22:50.348 Yeah. 300 00:22:50.348 --> 00:23:00.517 The only real way to do it is to do it using stable coins and to do it in a place where you're carrying minimal risk when these agents are transacting with each other. 301 00:23:00.537 --> 00:23:02.159 That's why payment finality matters, right? 302 00:23:02.399 --> 00:23:04.081 That's why sub-second finality matters. 303 00:23:04.401 --> 00:23:06.443 That's why credit markets for these agents matter. 304 00:23:06.763 --> 00:23:09.464 So all of that traffic is new and novel. 305 00:23:09.824 --> 00:23:15.385 And like, we are going to be using everything in our stack to essentially enable all of that traffic. 306 00:23:15.425 --> 00:23:25.908 So it's not just about, it's not just about like, hey, can your agent get a, you know, can you get, can your agent get a method of payment and can they go transact somewhere on the internet using X402 or some other protocol? 307 00:23:26.328 --> 00:23:27.449 It is much more than that. 308 00:23:27.489 --> 00:23:33.075 It is like, Hey, what are all the things that agents need so that they can truly become full economic actors? 309 00:23:33.175 --> 00:23:39.000 And like, much like you have a social security number, you have a work history, you have like an ability to prove all of that. 310 00:23:39.321 --> 00:23:40.602 How does an agent get all of that? 311 00:23:40.642 --> 00:23:41.883 That infrastructure doesn't exist. 312 00:23:41.963 --> 00:23:43.044 And I'm hoping, uh, 313 00:23:43.985 --> 00:23:45.206 This is not just on ARK. 314 00:23:45.226 --> 00:23:47.348 This is truly distributed on the internet, right? 315 00:23:47.369 --> 00:23:52.734 Like we want everybody to be able to access this infrastructure and we want this infrastructure to be in the open. 316 00:23:53.074 --> 00:23:57.779 That is sort of like a core thesis for us when it comes to like the agentic platform that we're launching on ARK. 317 00:23:57.899 --> 00:24:03.945 I've been trading crypto for almost a decade and I've used so many different wallets, exchanges, aggregators, different front ends over the years. 318 00:24:04.085 --> 00:24:05.907 And I'm always kind of looking for the same thing. 319 00:24:06.067 --> 00:24:16.077 Just one interface with deep liquidity across a bunch of chains and assets where I can access all the markets like perps, earn yield, trade confidentially and still control all my own funds. 320 00:24:16.398 --> 00:24:18.380 And I've never really found this experience. 321 00:24:18.400 --> 00:24:22.504 And I'm always switching wallets, juggling gas fees and just getting eaten by slippage. 322 00:24:22.784 --> 00:24:24.426 Near.com is not that. 323 00:24:24.746 --> 00:24:26.327 It feels fundamentally different to me. 324 00:24:26.407 --> 00:24:30.831 I can do everything I want from any chain and I keep all my activity confidential. 325 00:24:31.031 --> 00:24:33.814 I can even earn 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a new episode waiting for you now. 365 00:26:46.067 --> 00:26:47.688 Can you tap me and the listeners into... 366 00:26:48.328 --> 00:26:56.831 what the current state of play is in the world of agentic commerce, because I'm waiting for the world of agentic commerce to kind of come to me. 367 00:26:56.951 --> 00:26:57.952 I'm not really pursuing it. 368 00:26:57.972 --> 00:26:59.032 I'm not deep in those weeds. 369 00:26:59.452 --> 00:27:04.614 But I do know that agentic commerce is a very big buzzword, and people love to talk about it. 370 00:27:05.074 --> 00:27:06.656 I haven't yet experienced it. 371 00:27:06.956 --> 00:27:17.547 So what gives you and ARC the confidence that there is something there actually real worth pursuing rather than like a bunch of buzzwords that get people excited on podcasts? 372 00:27:17.567 --> 00:27:20.349 So like tap us into what's going on in that neck of the woods. 373 00:27:20.369 --> 00:27:20.810 What's real? 374 00:27:21.010 --> 00:27:25.815 Okay, let's talk about like agents as actors, like essentially, and then let's talk about agent e-commerce as well, right? 375 00:27:25.835 --> 00:27:29.039 Like, so agents as actors, agents are trading. 376 00:27:29.319 --> 00:27:32.343 They're trading, like people are firing up agents. 377 00:27:32.483 --> 00:27:37.309 Everybody has an idea, like a specific idea, like specific alpha that they'd like to go after. 378 00:27:37.889 --> 00:27:42.134 And they are firing up a pool of agents that are being used right now to do the trading activity right now. 379 00:27:42.254 --> 00:27:43.175 We see it on chain. 380 00:27:43.215 --> 00:27:44.856 We see the traffic patterns on chain. 381 00:27:46.037 --> 00:27:46.838 Agents are doing it. 382 00:27:46.918 --> 00:27:52.023 What you don't see enough of is like your agent taking your credit card and making a purchase for you. 383 00:27:52.543 --> 00:27:55.826 That I think is what you mean by like agentic commerce not being there. 384 00:27:56.326 --> 00:28:02.572 I do think in the last week or two, we have seen a bunch of new agents come out that are starting to use like, 385 00:28:03.072 --> 00:28:13.984 They are essentially taking your credit card, storing it in a vault, using, creating one-time auth, essentially, and policy to go and spend that money somewhere. 386 00:28:15.165 --> 00:28:18.709 That is just, I want to say, those agents themselves are only a month old. 387 00:28:18.909 --> 00:28:21.232 They are not very well distributed in the world right now. 388 00:28:21.872 --> 00:28:32.120 When those agents become much more distributed, like you will see like those agents, not just transacting using credit card rails, but also transacting using stable coin rails. 389 00:28:32.220 --> 00:28:49.834 And at that point, they'd be buying, they'd be buying things that you use like in the real physical world or the meat world, as we like to call it, like they would be using it to buy, like, you know, whether it's a plane ticket or whether it is like, whether it is something you want to, like, you know, a piece of clothing that you're looking to buy. 390 00:28:52.189 --> 00:28:54.430 I don't think the interface for that has existed so far. 391 00:28:54.570 --> 00:28:59.732 I don't know if you've kept up with these agents like in the last month, but like now I have my credit card enabled with an agent. 392 00:28:59.893 --> 00:29:02.514 And my first agentic purchase is actually a funny one. 393 00:29:03.594 --> 00:29:05.295 My cat needed flea medicine. 394 00:29:05.615 --> 00:29:11.958 I went to the vet, I got the prescription and I had my agent go and buy it from Chewy. 395 00:29:12.498 --> 00:29:13.779 And I was like, I don't want to deal with this. 396 00:29:13.799 --> 00:29:15.700 Can you please just make sure that this lands at my house? 397 00:29:15.800 --> 00:29:16.201 And it did. 398 00:29:16.541 --> 00:29:23.026 And so that is an example of agentic commerce, commerce transactions that you really don't want to engage with yourself. 399 00:29:23.306 --> 00:29:27.229 But on the other side, on the blockchain side, we still have agents essentially training. 400 00:29:27.289 --> 00:29:30.971 I mean, the agents are like, agents will be getting credit very soon. 401 00:29:31.231 --> 00:29:34.374 Like they will be taking, they will be sort of managing risk very soon. 402 00:29:34.534 --> 00:29:36.955 Like at more scale than they are able to do right now. 403 00:29:37.196 --> 00:29:39.998 Do you think, so there's already commerce on the internet. 404 00:29:40.018 --> 00:29:41.359 We have like Web2 commerce. 405 00:29:42.139 --> 00:29:47.684 How much of agentic commerce will simply consume normal Web2 commerce? 406 00:29:47.964 --> 00:29:56.871 Or is it more that there is net new commerce that will be discovered, built, built for the first time with agentic commerce? 407 00:29:56.991 --> 00:29:57.791 Or is it a little bit of both? 408 00:29:57.972 --> 00:30:04.777 Look, if it's goods and services like you're buying, like goods is like what we just described is like goods, goods commerce, right? 409 00:30:04.797 --> 00:30:10.962 Like you're out there trying to buy a widget and you want to make sure that the agent does a good job of buying the widget and like deals with the complexity of it. 410 00:30:11.736 --> 00:30:13.256 Services commerce is very different. 411 00:30:13.417 --> 00:30:25.180 Like I think services commerce is agents as essentially doing human-like work and sort of presenting that they can do full end-to-end human-like work. 412 00:30:25.800 --> 00:30:26.941 That I think is totally new. 413 00:30:27.041 --> 00:30:27.621 And that is... 414 00:30:28.281 --> 00:30:47.626 either you can argue is like replacement of the, like, you know, human labor or is additive to human labor or sort of fills in the gap where human labor has not been able to fill in the gap because it's just too expensive for a human to do it or the task is not big enough for a human to go create a company to do like $2 tasks like that, like an agent will take on. 415 00:30:47.986 --> 00:30:57.948 I think that's the opportunity, which is to say like, hey, I can either go do all of these things myself by using my own agent virtual machine and then building my own agents to do all of that 416 00:30:58.628 --> 00:31:02.151 or I can go hire a bunch of agents on the internet who can go do these things for me. 417 00:31:02.391 --> 00:31:03.191 We're not there yet. 418 00:31:03.592 --> 00:31:09.435 I think we're closer to the goods commerce right now because I see that as like superbly imminent. 419 00:31:09.616 --> 00:31:17.261 Like I think like I just give you an example of something of commerce that I didn't want to engage with that I was able to like utilize an agent to do that. 420 00:31:17.301 --> 00:31:21.884 But like when somebody is able to come in and say like, hey, look, we have an agent marketplace. 421 00:31:21.904 --> 00:31:26.327 You can see listings in there where people are able to say things like, can you translate this text for me? 422 00:31:26.787 --> 00:31:28.928 And then agent will come back and say like, yeah, I'll do it. 423 00:31:29.268 --> 00:31:31.750 You can pay me over X4 or two and it's going to cost you 30 cents. 424 00:31:32.170 --> 00:31:44.177 That's an example of something that is, I don't think a human setting up that company today to go translate like, you know, a paragraph of text and like, you know, is going through the entire economic negotiation of like, hey, are you going to pay me? 425 00:31:44.697 --> 00:31:50.641 And like making sure that like the payment happens and making sure that the work comes out and the work and making sure that the work is of high quality. 426 00:31:51.001 --> 00:32:06.892 So those piecemeal work that currently that humans either cannot do or are like not incented to do will get outsourced in my mind from like your private sort of like workspace or your private life onto the public internet. 427 00:32:07.572 --> 00:32:23.337 And there, these agents will become specialists in what they are able to like do, whether it's like an agent that can, maybe there's an agent that all it does is like figures out like how to order cat food or like how figures out how to do like, you know, pet medication or anything like that. 428 00:32:23.657 --> 00:32:26.478 And that agent is going to be far superior to anything I can build. 429 00:32:27.058 --> 00:32:31.460 And so, and much like there was this specialization on websites that happened, I want to say, 430 00:32:32.440 --> 00:32:33.421 20, 25 years ago. 431 00:32:33.501 --> 00:32:37.523 And like, it's about like, you know, in the 2002s that it started. 432 00:32:37.843 --> 00:32:39.444 I think the same thing will happen with agents. 433 00:32:39.484 --> 00:32:42.846 I think the current agents are like overly simple. 434 00:32:42.926 --> 00:32:47.368 They are like, we also currently assume that all agents have access to all data. 435 00:32:48.389 --> 00:32:49.890 None of those things are going to be true in the future. 436 00:32:50.290 --> 00:32:53.851 I think there's going to be a desire for people to sort of preserve their data. 437 00:32:54.211 --> 00:33:01.213 There's going to be a desire for people to sort of want to isolate their data and make sure that they're only sharing data that is necessary. 438 00:33:02.153 --> 00:33:06.634 And all of those things will lead to specialized economic actors existing on the internet. 439 00:33:07.234 --> 00:33:12.276 And then transactions happening between them, with humans and them, or three-way transactions. 440 00:33:12.356 --> 00:33:17.857 A lot of times when I get a ping at work, I'm not sure if I'm getting that ping from an agent or I'm getting it from a human. 441 00:33:18.172 --> 00:33:44.108 So in this world of agentic commerce and agents with money, agents with private keys, what parts of this stack is ARC and Circle really taking ownership over in terms of like building and innovating and refining versus what other parts are like blockers for you guys that you guys need other parties, other startups, other tech companies to build to really complete this whole holistic agentic. 442 00:33:44.428 --> 00:33:47.129 What part of the agentic stack do you guys touch? 443 00:33:47.249 --> 00:33:51.810 And then what other parts of the agentic stack are you guys needing to like partner with and collaborate with? 444 00:33:52.030 --> 00:33:55.811 Yeah, the part of the agentic stack that we touch is like basically bottom up, right? 445 00:33:55.831 --> 00:33:57.531 Like we are not an application level agent. 446 00:33:57.631 --> 00:34:04.833 We're not going to build an agent that says like, hey, here's a, I don't want to say never say never, but like, you know, be an example that is like really adjacent to us. 447 00:34:05.033 --> 00:34:07.234 That's not something that we're going to be building immediately. 448 00:34:07.254 --> 00:34:10.954 It's like, go figure out like what like stocks to buy to go invest, right? 449 00:34:10.974 --> 00:34:12.695 Like all of these assets that are issued on, 450 00:34:13.435 --> 00:34:28.382 Arc, if you come in and you say like, hey, this is my portfolio, this is my sort of like investment horizon, I am pretty sure there are better agents out there than like what Circle can build or like is building or plans to build that will get built. 451 00:34:28.942 --> 00:34:31.583 And so like I'm not interested in going and building that agent. 452 00:34:31.743 --> 00:34:36.045 What I am interested in building is like all the primitives that are needed to discover that agent. 453 00:34:36.625 --> 00:34:53.098 all the primitives that are needed to like approve that this agent comes from a good economic actor who is not going to steal my data and like is going to try to hack me using, whether it's like directly or through social engineering or something else, right? 454 00:34:53.338 --> 00:34:57.941 And I want to be able to sort of prove to the user that this agent has an excellent work history. 455 00:34:58.101 --> 00:35:02.865 Like they are like, you know, they have sort of done this for 10,000 other users and they have had excellent results. 456 00:35:03.585 --> 00:35:05.247 All of those primitives we want to build. 457 00:35:05.947 --> 00:35:15.372 That means that now the agents can live on ARK, they can transact on ARK, and as they build history on ARK, they are able to essentially prove to users that they are good economic actors. 458 00:35:16.113 --> 00:35:17.873 And they're able to prove to other agents as well. 459 00:35:17.914 --> 00:35:19.674 It's not just users who will care about this. 460 00:35:19.714 --> 00:35:25.818 If I have an agent and I tell them to go hire another agent, they have good incentives to make sure that that agent that they are hiring... 461 00:35:26.478 --> 00:35:30.321 is a good agent, has all of these like properties. 462 00:35:30.822 --> 00:35:33.464 So towards that, we are building an agent marketplace. 463 00:35:33.564 --> 00:35:35.325 We are building an agent reputation system. 464 00:35:35.366 --> 00:35:43.712 We are building ways for agents to pay each other very small amounts of money, like almost a millionth of a dollar using Circle Nano payments. 465 00:35:44.773 --> 00:35:54.742 We're making it so that agents can get credit and like make sure that like if you are able to prove that you are able to run a book and that is a profitable book, like, 466 00:35:55.242 --> 00:35:56.183 How should you get credit? 467 00:35:56.243 --> 00:35:58.864 Like, you know, and when you start up, like you have no money. 468 00:35:59.684 --> 00:36:02.566 How are you supposed to on-ramp as an agent into the money? 469 00:36:02.626 --> 00:36:09.390 So like all of those problems at the lower level, we will solve or we are hoping to solve over the next like year or two. 470 00:36:09.950 --> 00:36:14.873 And the problems on top of that are like the applications themselves, which I think others will build. 471 00:36:15.253 --> 00:36:17.755 And I don't think those applications are just financial applications. 472 00:36:17.775 --> 00:36:23.678 This could be any number of applications, travel, commerce, education, like all of these applications 473 00:36:23.998 --> 00:36:26.961 The underpinning for all of these activities is value exchange. 474 00:36:27.062 --> 00:36:30.746 And that value exchange that needs to happen needs to be trustworthy. 475 00:36:30.866 --> 00:36:32.708 And that value exchange needs to be final. 476 00:36:32.868 --> 00:36:35.190 And that value exchange needs to be fast. 477 00:36:35.811 --> 00:36:37.113 All of that are enabled. 478 00:36:37.293 --> 00:36:37.453 Yeah. 479 00:36:37.598 --> 00:36:43.462 I want to turn to the world of tokenized stocks because that's also a phenomenon that is happening in the crypto industry right now. 480 00:36:44.543 --> 00:36:52.929 Are you guys going after trying to compete with things like the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange in the sense that, you know, those two things are dollar denominated. 481 00:36:53.369 --> 00:36:55.331 With ARK, we have a dollar denominated blockchain. 482 00:36:55.471 --> 00:36:58.093 Blockchains are asset transaction ledgers. 483 00:36:58.773 --> 00:37:02.296 Are you guys trying to go and be competitive in the world of tokenized stocks? 484 00:37:02.756 --> 00:37:05.399 liquidity and trading volume for tokenized stocks? 485 00:37:05.839 --> 00:37:07.641 Or are you more passive on that front? 486 00:37:07.801 --> 00:37:10.163 We want those applications to use us, right? 487 00:37:10.183 --> 00:37:11.224 Like we are not the exchange. 488 00:37:11.384 --> 00:37:16.209 We are not the, we are the infrastructure on which you can build an exchange. 489 00:37:16.449 --> 00:37:18.070 We are the infrastructure for settlement. 490 00:37:19.271 --> 00:37:20.332 We, we, 491 00:37:22.320 --> 00:37:24.902 So, I mean, I think that's fairly obvious. 492 00:37:24.942 --> 00:37:27.264 I think there's no secret there. 493 00:37:27.344 --> 00:37:29.465 We're not competing in the exchange market. 494 00:37:30.006 --> 00:37:38.152 We want these actors to use ARK to do settlement and to enter into complex financial transactions. 495 00:37:38.252 --> 00:37:42.515 Have those financial transactions be expressed as smart contracts and have those be on ARK. 496 00:37:43.055 --> 00:37:44.877 So that's our hope. 497 00:37:45.057 --> 00:37:48.680 And so do we want more of these real-world asset issuers on ARK? 498 00:37:48.781 --> 00:37:49.241 Absolutely. 499 00:37:49.261 --> 00:37:59.831 We're going after them, and we're trying to solve for problems they may have, whether it is like core chain features that they have or whether it's liquidity issues that they're trying to solve for. 500 00:38:00.992 --> 00:38:03.975 Maybe it's like USDC on-off ramp issues that they're concerned about. 501 00:38:04.075 --> 00:38:06.558 Maybe sometimes these on-off ramp issues are combined with 502 00:38:07.098 --> 00:38:13.362 geographical issues being like, hey, I have an on-off ramp issue in the EU or in Japan as I'm trying to do this specific trade. 503 00:38:13.783 --> 00:38:15.524 How does that work? 504 00:38:15.924 --> 00:38:20.027 But like, I do think like there will be, there's two versions of this. 505 00:38:20.247 --> 00:38:22.849 One is like, hey, I'm doing an activity already. 506 00:38:22.889 --> 00:38:23.850 Can I do it on chain? 507 00:38:23.910 --> 00:38:31.735 Because I can then unlock 24-7 activity with all the same actors, with no new actors participating because now you have this 24-7 infrastructure. 508 00:38:32.296 --> 00:38:33.937 And then there is the piece which is, 509 00:38:34.517 --> 00:38:43.399 Well, I have like all this new demand that I can bring to, which I can bring to this asset because I can open up access to this asset all over the board. 510 00:38:43.679 --> 00:38:45.200 And USDC has both properties, right? 511 00:38:45.220 --> 00:38:51.121 Like you can, if you're in the US, you have access to bank accounts, but if you have USDC, you can settle with each other 24-7. 512 00:38:51.461 --> 00:39:00.403 But because you have USDC, you can now actually give people, people who are in emerging markets, people in the EU, people in South America, access to USDC. 513 00:39:00.423 --> 00:39:02.444 I think the same thing will be true for stocks, right? 514 00:39:02.464 --> 00:39:03.864 Like I think in the US, people will, 515 00:39:04.764 --> 00:39:11.249 will probably move on chain because they can like trade faster and manage their liquidity better, manage risk better. 516 00:39:11.329 --> 00:39:22.217 And internationally, I think we will have like new demand coming in because like people who want to raise money, as like AI becomes more proliferated around the world, there should be more companies in the world. 517 00:39:22.237 --> 00:39:26.641 There are more companies in the world because you can actually hire, go hire these economic actors around the world. 518 00:39:27.221 --> 00:39:30.603 then these companies will have like stronger need for like capital formation. 519 00:39:30.903 --> 00:39:38.406 And these capital formation, like, well, they won't want to issue like, you know, some sort of token or some stock to essentially do that capital formation. 520 00:39:38.466 --> 00:39:49.671 So, and on the other, on the users on the other side, we want to get access to the best tokens or the best stock around the world to make sure that they're getting the, you know, the best outcome for the capital that they're investing. 521 00:39:49.691 --> 00:39:52.593 So like this, this whole world is about to blow up in terms of, 522 00:39:53.293 --> 00:39:59.576 what access users have and then what access even the companies have in terms of like the investors that they can reach out to. 523 00:39:59.816 --> 00:40:03.098 What about the world of on-ramps onto ARK? 524 00:40:03.618 --> 00:40:15.725 Yeah, I think Circle and ARK is uniquely positioned here in that Circle has some of the best banking relationships, if not the best banking relationships in the entire crypto industry domestically inside the United States. 525 00:40:16.585 --> 00:40:23.973 What about building like kind of like a first party on-ramp system into the ARK blockchain? 526 00:40:24.033 --> 00:40:35.586 And then also even extending that into non-US jurisdictions where we can get like non-US dollar stable coins with direct banking relationships right on to ARK. 527 00:40:35.606 --> 00:40:36.847 Because the on-ramp system. 528 00:40:37.768 --> 00:40:41.730 problem has never truly been solved at a large scale in crypto. 529 00:40:42.390 --> 00:40:46.052 And really, if you want to distill down what Circle is, it's like the best on-ramp ever. 530 00:40:46.172 --> 00:40:52.695 Like that is what USDC is, is like the best, highest, biggest conduit between bank dollars and Circle dollars. 531 00:40:53.415 --> 00:40:56.637 What about building out like the richest, best set of on-ramps? 532 00:40:56.677 --> 00:40:57.898 Is that something on your guys' radar? 533 00:40:58.118 --> 00:41:02.320 Yeah, I mean, like from an institutional on-ramp perspective, we have... 534 00:41:03.318 --> 00:41:03.738 You're right. 535 00:41:03.778 --> 00:41:06.739 Like we are the best on-off ramps for the whole ecosystem. 536 00:41:06.979 --> 00:41:20.241 I was just looking at something the other day and we counted like almost more than $900 billion of like off-ramping that we have done over the span of USDC. 537 00:41:20.321 --> 00:41:25.382 And that means that that many people had sort of like USDC that on-ramped into USDC. 538 00:41:25.422 --> 00:41:31.803 And that's almost a trillion dollars of like USDC that is on-off ramp over the lifespan of USDC. 539 00:41:33.223 --> 00:41:37.384 So yes, we do have good institutional-grader on-off ramps. 540 00:41:37.544 --> 00:41:41.726 Users currently get access to these on-off ramps primarily through exchanges. 541 00:41:41.826 --> 00:41:44.366 I think everybody understands that. 542 00:41:44.466 --> 00:41:50.288 We are working on more retail-focused on-off ramps. 543 00:41:50.448 --> 00:41:55.049 They are part of the ARK launch. 544 00:41:55.229 --> 00:41:59.031 There's more coming in terms of making sure that 545 00:42:01.231 --> 00:42:04.512 users in other markets can also get access to these on-off ramps. 546 00:42:04.552 --> 00:42:14.976 And then from a liquidity perspective, like I think if you're getting, trying to on-off ramp into on-ramp into a local stable coin, the question is like, how does that liquidity work? 547 00:42:15.036 --> 00:42:19.378 And there we have a ton of experience in provisioning liquidity around the world. 548 00:42:20.218 --> 00:42:23.844 We understand the cost structure of provisioning that liquidity. 549 00:42:24.665 --> 00:42:34.959 We also, we talked a little bit about stable FX, which is our ability to sort of swap these local currencies into USDC or some other stable coin. 550 00:42:35.520 --> 00:42:40.043 We're working with market makers who can, on the maker side, who can go make these markets. 551 00:42:40.083 --> 00:42:46.206 We're also working with takers to make sure that these takers essentially represent end users. 552 00:42:46.807 --> 00:42:49.528 So these are large financial markets. 553 00:42:49.568 --> 00:42:51.749 I think everybody knows the size of FX markets. 554 00:42:51.809 --> 00:42:53.430 It's in the trillions traded every day. 555 00:42:54.731 --> 00:42:58.533 And the dollar is pretty dominant in terms of as a quoting asset. 556 00:42:58.834 --> 00:42:59.094 So... 557 00:43:00.326 --> 00:43:04.332 we're just on day one of like trying to figure out all of that, right? 558 00:43:04.352 --> 00:43:06.094 And a lot of these things are not exchanges. 559 00:43:06.114 --> 00:43:10.079 These are private pools that operate for like these on-off ramps. 560 00:43:10.921 --> 00:43:15.807 And so we are connecting into all of these private pools and making sure that these private pools 561 00:43:16.428 --> 00:43:18.890 have access to liquidity that is ARC native. 562 00:43:19.191 --> 00:43:24.056 And then we have like a core protocol on ARC that allows for people to sort of like go and access these liquidity pools. 563 00:43:24.296 --> 00:43:25.877 So it's not just about the issuance. 564 00:43:26.338 --> 00:43:29.701 It's not just making sure that like, you know, ARC has finality. 565 00:43:30.182 --> 00:43:35.647 It's also like going and finding these liquidity pools and then connecting into those liquidity pools and making sure that. 566 00:43:35.907 --> 00:43:45.409 those folks also have access to things like Circle Mint, which is a product from Circle, which allows people to come in and get access to USDC and get on-off ramps into USDC. 567 00:43:45.429 --> 00:43:52.391 So that's where the full stack argument matters, which is to say like, yes, is it like another L1? 568 00:43:52.971 --> 00:43:55.912 Or is it like, does it have applications on top of it? 569 00:43:55.992 --> 00:44:00.593 And absolutely it has applications on top of it, which is to say the applications are the stablecoins. 570 00:44:01.133 --> 00:44:19.363 the marketplaces to trade those stable coins and the pools of like liquidity that will make it possible for those marketplaces to exist and the additional circle products that are needed to actually enable those pools of the pools of capital to be successful and like be profitable. 571 00:44:20.016 --> 00:44:27.265 All of that needs to fall into place and all of that needs to be compliant and all of that needs to be like, you know, be okay with the regulators and all of that. 572 00:44:27.285 --> 00:44:29.808 So that's Circle's value as it gets into this game. 573 00:44:30.028 --> 00:44:34.093 Right after agentic commerce, I feel like for FX, 574 00:44:35.294 --> 00:44:41.442 is like the next biggest golden goose that you guys at Circle is really just right next to. 575 00:44:42.062 --> 00:44:47.129 I don't know if Circle has intent to go into like adjacent economies. 576 00:44:47.189 --> 00:44:48.590 I know that there's the euro. 577 00:44:48.630 --> 00:44:50.333 Circle already has like a euro product. 578 00:44:51.494 --> 00:45:01.062 But really, I think the picture gets completed when basically all of the fiat currencies are tokenized in a high fidelity way, all in one place. 579 00:45:01.522 --> 00:45:08.528 I don't know if Circle is trying to go and do the role of Circle in every single jurisdiction that has like a well-used fiat currency. 580 00:45:08.828 --> 00:45:14.473 But that seems very close to what Circle is already doing and also very valuable. 581 00:45:15.014 --> 00:45:16.535 How is Circle and ARK thinking about that? 582 00:45:16.675 --> 00:45:17.756 I agree it's very valuable. 583 00:45:17.916 --> 00:45:23.542 I think it is how things should work. 584 00:45:23.702 --> 00:45:24.983 They don't work like that today. 585 00:45:26.605 --> 00:45:28.106 So here are a few things that are happening. 586 00:45:28.307 --> 00:45:32.110 One is genius goes into effect in January, right? 587 00:45:32.130 --> 00:45:37.776 So once genius goes into effect, we have a regulatory framework which is being overseen by the feds. 588 00:45:41.077 --> 00:45:43.017 What does that mean for other countries? 589 00:45:43.077 --> 00:45:52.019 The other countries are waiting for like the U.S. laws to be final so they can finalize how they will do stablecoin laws in their country. 590 00:45:52.740 --> 00:45:52.920 Right. 591 00:45:53.020 --> 00:45:54.900 And so this is true for a vast majority of the world. 592 00:45:54.940 --> 00:46:03.122 So one, once Genius happens, we expect the regulatory frameworks across the world to evolve to support more local stablecoins. 593 00:46:03.962 --> 00:46:14.225 Second, I don't think it is feasible for us to go operate stablecoins in like, you know, over 190 countries around the world. 594 00:46:14.245 --> 00:46:16.126 Like that's the number of countries in the world. 595 00:46:17.066 --> 00:46:19.567 We have like stablecoins in the two large markets. 596 00:46:19.607 --> 00:46:22.568 We have the USDC and we have the EU. 597 00:46:24.068 --> 00:46:30.831 And for now, when it comes to issuance, like circle issuing the stable coins, I think we're going to stay with that. 598 00:46:31.331 --> 00:46:38.694 We're going to go partner with other stable coins because these local actors, they know the regulators well. 599 00:46:38.714 --> 00:46:40.075 They understand local law well. 600 00:46:40.115 --> 00:46:41.836 They understand local user needs well. 601 00:46:42.616 --> 00:46:48.419 They have good relationships in the market when it comes to money traders and they understand how to make the economics work. 602 00:46:50.020 --> 00:46:52.263 we're going to keep working with them. 603 00:46:52.584 --> 00:47:04.360 Our value add is going to be the connecting like these pools of liquidity and making sure that we are running like stable effects, which is part of ARK, so that like users can come in and they... 604 00:47:04.840 --> 00:47:10.584 They can just go query these pools of liquidity for like the best rates that they can get and they can get the liquidity they want. 605 00:47:10.604 --> 00:47:13.646 So it is currently in the market. 606 00:47:13.686 --> 00:47:19.110 There's primarily AMM based solutions for like for these things and you don't get a lot of liquidity over there. 607 00:47:19.170 --> 00:47:22.373 So like we have AMM based solutions on ARK as well. 608 00:47:22.893 --> 00:47:28.177 But like an RFQ based system, which allows for like this liquidity to be there and to make sure that like. 609 00:47:28.837 --> 00:47:34.502 The transaction is successful as in like you don't like put up your dollars and not get like the local stable coin or the other way around. 610 00:47:34.522 --> 00:47:34.662 Right. 611 00:47:34.682 --> 00:47:39.606 Just making sure that that whole protocol works in a permissionless way is what we're trying to focus on. 612 00:47:39.626 --> 00:47:41.848 Nikhil, so today is launch day. 613 00:47:41.989 --> 00:47:44.991 What are you guys focused on in the very short term? 614 00:47:45.011 --> 00:47:47.493 So the end of this week, next week as well. 615 00:47:47.573 --> 00:47:52.678 What are your nearest term priorities that you guys have to get ARK up and running and successful? 616 00:47:52.958 --> 00:48:01.062 I mean, look, it is, we're going to probably go to the war room and hang out there and make sure that like things are working correctly. 617 00:48:02.302 --> 00:48:04.643 It's a little bit of a relief because we've been working on it. 618 00:48:04.903 --> 00:48:09.065 I think Circle has wanted to invest in this space for a long time. 619 00:48:09.426 --> 00:48:12.407 We have been working on this L1 project for... 620 00:48:13.641 --> 00:48:16.122 I think close to 18 months at this point. 621 00:48:16.782 --> 00:48:26.644 So I think we might take an hour or two to just like have a beer and like take a break and then get back to it, which is to say that like, we want to make sure that like, you know, we are serving our users. 622 00:48:26.684 --> 00:48:32.986 Like I'm expecting users to come in and start transacting on ARK. 623 00:48:33.046 --> 00:48:37.007 And we want to make sure that like, you know, transactions are working, privacy is working, 624 00:48:37.867 --> 00:48:39.188 StableFX is working. 625 00:48:39.468 --> 00:48:41.969 The institutional RWAs have the liquidity they have. 626 00:48:42.929 --> 00:48:46.991 We've promised a lot in terms of how much functionality is going to be available on Arc on day one. 627 00:48:47.531 --> 00:48:52.413 So just making sure that all of that functionality is immediately available and is working as users expect 628 00:48:53.173 --> 00:48:56.595 And it's working not just for us, it is working for developers, it's working for users. 629 00:48:56.756 --> 00:49:00.878 For the next three months, we have a very rich roadmap in terms of like new privacy features. 630 00:49:01.879 --> 00:49:04.261 We have like new agent features coming out. 631 00:49:04.361 --> 00:49:07.823 We probably add more validators to the set as like things mature on our side. 632 00:49:08.944 --> 00:49:11.966 And so, and then eventually we're planning for a proof of stake launch as well. 633 00:49:12.006 --> 00:49:13.947 So we want to make sure that we are ready for that as well. 634 00:49:13.967 --> 00:49:16.629 So like those are the things that we're going to be working on. 635 00:49:16.689 --> 00:49:17.250 Yeah. 636 00:49:17.290 --> 00:49:17.790 Quick question. 637 00:49:17.930 --> 00:49:20.352 Does Jeremy have any pets that's, 638 00:49:22.187 --> 00:49:22.607 Do you know? 639 00:49:23.088 --> 00:49:23.629 As animals? 640 00:49:24.489 --> 00:49:24.790 Yeah. 641 00:49:25.110 --> 00:49:26.572 Does he have a dog or a cat? 642 00:49:27.613 --> 00:49:28.754 He's never mentioned it to me. 643 00:49:28.774 --> 00:49:30.235 I've known him for five years now. 644 00:49:30.356 --> 00:49:32.918 So why do you ask? 645 00:49:32.938 --> 00:49:33.339 No pets. 646 00:49:33.619 --> 00:49:33.859 Okay. 647 00:49:34.640 --> 00:49:39.265 Well, because usually the name of a founder's pet is a pretty hot meme coin target. 648 00:49:39.325 --> 00:49:41.928 And so I know you guys are trying to do... 649 00:49:44.047 --> 00:49:44.928 I'm sure you can tweet that in there. 650 00:49:44.948 --> 00:49:49.712 I know you guys are doing like a gents of commerce and all that kind of stuff, but the first thing that's going to happen on ARK is meme coins. 651 00:49:49.752 --> 00:49:55.497 And so if Jeremy's got a pet, I want to know its name, but maybe I'll have to dig around in a different location for that. 652 00:49:56.382 --> 00:50:01.427 I'm very sure if you can tweet at him or like you can DM him and he'll get back. 653 00:50:02.007 --> 00:50:05.310 And Jeremy's pretty open and Jeremy's pretty active on Twitter. 654 00:50:05.350 --> 00:50:07.532 So like, or X, sorry. 655 00:50:07.692 --> 00:50:10.655 And so, and Jeremy loves the internet. 656 00:50:10.755 --> 00:50:13.337 Like, I mean, like Jeremy's an old internet founder. 657 00:50:13.357 --> 00:50:15.920 Like he's sort of created two internet companies before this. 658 00:50:16.560 --> 00:50:29.242 So I think like while Jeremy presents well in a suit, which I love, he's truly at heart, like a person of the internet, like, you know, and so I think he's looking forward to all of it is, is like my take on it. 659 00:50:29.262 --> 00:50:31.943 He's sort of, he's, he is so excited about this. 660 00:50:32.123 --> 00:50:36.724 He, he has been wanting this, wanting to work on this for some time. 661 00:50:36.944 --> 00:50:41.565 And like, it has taken a certain sort of like, you know, certain path, like we went public last year. 662 00:50:41.585 --> 00:50:42.465 So, yeah. 663 00:50:43.605 --> 00:50:46.866 It has taken us somewhat like, you know, circuitous path to get here. 664 00:50:46.886 --> 00:50:48.546 But like, I think he's very excited to be here. 665 00:50:48.586 --> 00:50:53.867 And I'm sure like he'll probably reveal the name of his pet himself. 666 00:50:53.887 --> 00:50:55.027 Yeah. 667 00:50:56.707 --> 00:50:57.548 Nikhil, this has been great. 668 00:50:57.568 --> 00:50:58.388 Thanks for coming on the show. 669 00:50:59.088 --> 00:50:59.548 Thanks, David. 670 00:50:59.848 --> 00:51:01.148 Bankless Nation, guys know the deal. 671 00:51:01.168 --> 00:51:03.729 Crypto is risky, but not risky enough. 672 00:51:03.969 --> 00:51:05.489 The institutions have landed. 673 00:51:06.009 --> 00:51:07.089 So we're going even further west. 674 00:51:07.129 --> 00:51:07.929 This is the frontier. 675 00:51:08.189 --> 00:51:10.650 It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. 676 00:51:10.770 --> 00:51:11.110 Thanks a lot.