The Agentic Economy: How AI Agents Will Transform the Financial System with Circle Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire
Episode publishedPodcast: No Priors: Artificial Intellig...No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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Today I know Priors, have Jeremy Allaire, the co founder and CEO of Circle. We'll be talking about cryptocurrency, AI, agentic payments, AI evolving on the blockchain, and a variety of other topics. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you.
It's great to be here. Thank you. So maybe we can start with
you just giving a quick overview of Circle, what you do, how you approach the world, because I think we're going to be talking a lot about stablecoins, crypto, AI, and how all these things tie into sort of the agentic future. But I'd love to just start with sort of origins of the company, what you all are up to, and we can go from there.
Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, Circle's been around for a while. I co founded the company over yeah, thirteen years ago or so, 2013. 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, you know, working on kind of internet infrastructure for a long time, and got really excited like if we had like a protocol for dollars on the internet, that, you know, potentially we could have a way to store and move value, you know, instantly, g
Why is we the dollar aspect of that important? So if you look at a lot of the things that happened in cryptocurrency in the early days, it was really about creating things that were divorced from the traditional financial system if possible, were not dollar centric. So, for example, Bitcoin was in part a response to the great financial crisis, and the view that all sorts of weird bailouts happened there, and therefore we needed some alternative sort of financial infrastructure for the world.
Yeah. So, think, so actually, what's very interesting is like, I believe in kind of Austrian economic thought. I was studying Austrian economic thought like in the early 1990s for a very long time. And so, I've been interested in sound money theory. And actually, it was studying the kind of impact of the global financial crisis that drew me into this, because my view is like there has to be a way to build like a safer financial system. And 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 there is no way to frac
Full reserve money means currency that's backed by something hard behind it, some asset.
Doesn't necessarily mean it's a hard back. Full reserve money is different than, say, fractional Full reserve banking, I should say, is different than fractional reserve banking. And so, you know, back in There was another major economic collapse, which was the Great Depression, the run on all the banks, and all that fun. And in the 1930s, there was a really big debate about like, what's the right construct for the banking system and the financial system? And there was a proposal from a group of economists called the Chicago Plan. And the kind of ringleader was a Chicago economist. Actually, i
So what are stablecoins currently backed by? My understanding is, for example, the stablecoin companies are big buyers of treasuries, or US treasuries, and other sort of instruments like that. Could you explain a bit more sort of what tends to back these things?
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