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

Jeremy Allaire: And really at inception, I was really excited about this idea that we could create a protocol for dollars on the internet. And I had been really excited about what was happening with technologies like Bitcoin and had been working on kind of internet infrastructure for a long time. and got really excited, if we had a protocol for dollars on the internet, that potentially we could have a way to store and move value instantly, globally, frictionlessly, at no cost, ultimately. The other idea that we were really excited about back then was this idea of programmable money and the idea that eventually these networks, blockchains, would become like operating systems and you could actually have machines that intermediate economic activity and financial activity on the internet, including like autonomous software machines.

Jeremy Allaire: The key issue there was I was interested in this idea of full reserve money. And in some ways, Bitcoin is full reserve money because you kind of, there is no way to fractionally lend Bitcoin per se. So full reserve money means currency that's backed by something hard behind it, some asset. [...] So my philosophy has been, right now, in terms of general utility, our existing economic system, it does depend on really major reserve currencies like the dollar. And my view is like, that's going to continue for a while, maybe 30, 40, 50 years. It'll continue for a while. But what we want to do is construct a system that is in fact safer. So a full reserve form of money. And that's what stablecoins are. That's what dollar stablecoins are. And in fact, with the Genius Act that passed last year, it's sort of codified in law. Like you can't do anything with this. It's like this very narrowly bound, narrow money kind of model.

Jeremy Allaire: The conception of this obviously is like a general protocol for dollars on the internet. And in fact, the whole design is this is like a general purpose, general architecture money. And we actually see it used, you know, from at the very smallest end, like someone who's paying, you know, 25 cents for a digital object in a digital game that's built on a blockchain, that would be like one end. Or even now we're starting to see, and we'll come back to this topic, I'm sure, AI agents that are paying for the output of essentially the AI tokens of another AI agent, and they're spending, again, just a dollar, 50 cents, 20 cents, et cetera. So super tiny transactions at one end, all the way to the largest electronic trading firms in the world that do huge amounts of capital markets activity who are settling multi-hundred million dollars transactions. And the powerful thing is it's all the same. Just like, if I send you an e-mail, and my email's like, hey, this is what I had for breakfast, the payload of that is the same as if I sent you an e-mail that had like a CAA dossier attached to it. USDC doesn't care. So as a general architecture, it can be used across a huge range of things.

Jeremy Allaire: And we actually see it used, you know, from at the very smallest end, like someone who's paying, you know, 25 cents for a digital object in a digital game that's built on a blockchain, that would be like one end. Or even now we're starting to see, and we'll come back to this topic, I'm sure, AI agents that are paying for the output of essentially the AI tokens of another AI agent, and they're spending, again, just a dollar, 50 cents, 20 cents, et cetera. So super tiny transactions at one end, all the way to the largest electronic trading firms in the world that do huge amounts of capital markets activity who are settling multi-hundred million dollars transactions. And the powerful thing is it's all the same. Just like, if I send you an e-mail, and my email's like, hey, this is what I had for breakfast, the payload of that is the same as if I sent you an e-mail that had like a CAA dossier attached to it. USDC doesn't care. So as a general architecture, it can be used across a huge range of things.

Jeremy Allaire: My view is that blockchain networks are operating systems. They're going to be operating systems. [...] And they have compute engines. They have virtual machines. And you can write Turing complete code. You can write software that runs on these. But there's some really key attributes that make them different. So the first is that the code is sort of tamper resistant. Once it's published, it's sort of like out as like a machine that's tamper resistant. The second is it's perfectly auditable. You can audit every single input and output of that machine, of that code in real time. Because it's all on a public blockchain, so anybody in the world can look it up. So it's like all the compute is public, accessible. It's open source by nature, and that's really powerful as well. And it also has these sort of, essentially, kind of transaction and compute integrity assurances. And this is really key, and it ties back to AI as well, which is like, you want assurances that the machine is doing what it said it's going to do, and you want kind of the inputs and outputs to be provable to, and the state of the machine to be provable. [...] And as we're moving into the AI driven economic system, right, having those mechanisms becomes even more important.

Jeremy Allaire: My view is that blockchain networks are operating systems. They're going to be operating systems. And so when we think about operating systems, we have lots of paradigms for that. We have mobile operating systems. The web was itself kind of an operating system with a runtime and a language model and an object model. And, you know, clouds became kind of like these big virtual operating system environments. AI foundation models are now essentially operating systems that execute tasks and other things. Blockchains are operating systems. And they have compute engines. They have virtual machines. And you can write Turing complete code. You can write software that runs on these. But there's some really key attributes that make them different. So the first is that the code is sort of tamper resistant. Once it's published, it's sort of like out as like a machine that's tamper resistant. The second is it's perfectly auditable. You can audit every single input and output of that machine, of that code in real time. Because it's all on a public blockchain, so anybody in the world can look it up. So it's like all the compute is public, accessible. It's open source by nature, and that's really powerful as well. And it also has these sort of, essentially, kind of transaction and compute integrity assurances. And this is really key, and it ties back to AI as well, which is like, you want assurances that the machine is doing what it said it's going to do, and you want kind of the inputs and outputs to be provable to, and the state of the machine to be provable.

Jeremy Allaire: And so if you have AI agents that are from around the world, they could be generated from lots of different models and LLMs and the like, and they need to kind of coordinate They need a medium, a trustworthy medium where they can do that, where they can instantiate an entity, where they can store value in that entity. They can execute and arrange contracts that intermediate the work and the tasks, and that where all of it is real-time mathematically and computationally provable. And so Blockchain infrastructure now actually gives us the building blocks for, when I say agentic economic activity, most people think, oh, that's e-commerce or payment, it's not. Agentic economic activity is actually how does the organization of what we used to think of as labor and capital, but essentially like kind of how does this organization of kind of compute work happen and what kinds of corporate forms might emerge in that world to do that? ... And so ARC as an economic operating system is conceived of as a compute environment for laying down all of the building blocks of economic activity, whether that's storing value, moving money, or instantiating a corporate form or manifesting and intermediating complex contracts. ... And it's interesting is that the drivers of this machine economy are actually machines. And so, you know, our view is Ark is designed for this moment, which is a moment when machines are going to play a larger and larger role in all of the output of the economic system.

Jeremy Allaire: We describe ARC as an economic operating system. And this goes back to a comment I made earlier, which is, these networks are operating systems. And we're moving now from the kind of like early adopter era, which you're very familiar with, which was mostly around like, speculation on different things. [...] I think my view is that as we go forward, the substance of what we think of as contracts, the substance of what we think of as corporations, are going to be software machines themselves. And so we're going to see this progression. And so ARC as an economic operating system is conceived of as a compute environment for laying down all of the building blocks of economic activity, whether that's storing value, moving money, or instantiating a corporate form or manifesting and intermediating complex contracts. Like a lot of this stuff, which was conceptual a long time ago, is now like real. And we have a legal basis for it. We have a regulatory clarity for it increasingly. And it's interesting is that the drivers of this machine economy are actually machines. And so our view is Ark is designed for this moment, which is a moment when machines are going to play a larger and larger role in all of the output of the economic system.