“The Internet? Is that thing still around?” Homer Simpson’s immortal line underscores a simple pattern: as an innovation matures, it shifts from fad to fixture. The technology moves into the background and its utility for society moves to the foreground.
This shift was pronounced for the digital assets ecosystem at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos. For Circle, the issuer of digital dollar payment stablecoin USDC, this is a good thing.
Circle’s Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy Dante Disparte has seen this maturation up close as a Davos regular for the past eight years.
“It’s not dissimilar to the way the internet had to go through its dotcom bubble phase to hand over the development of the Internet to more durable, trusting and safe hands,” he told CNBC.
Joking that he’s now a “vintage player,” Disparte says the industry can now tell the story of results and not just the story of the technology.
As Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire explained in a piece for WEF, “Until now, it has been far too difficult for most people and businesses to do much with the internet financial system… We’re entering a new phase where the complexity is fading into the background…This is paving the way for a future in which billions of people will interact with the internet financial system on a daily basis without needing to understand how it works, just as they use email, messaging apps, and browsers to access the internet without directly touching complexity.”
“Trillions of dollars of real economic activity,” Allaire noted, “could take place on the internet financial system in the next few years.”
The array of Fortune 500 firms that engaged with our leadership team at Davos reflects a growing convergence of stablecoin infrastructure with traditional banking, finance, payments, and aid.
“The mainstream phase of this is one in which you’ve brought together regulation, traditional finance, and blockchain technology and leading crypto players that can connect those worlds together,” Allaire told Bloomberg news. “There’s no question that the killer app of blockchains today are stablecoins.”
What makes it killer?
In simple terms, USDC takes the utility, reliability, and stability of the US dollar and gives it the superpowers of the Internet – programmability, portability, and accessibility, not to mention ultra-fast speed and ultra-low cost.
With global regulation for stablecoins poised to gain momentum in 2024, the new internet financial system is set to become even more of a fixture.
As it does so, Circle will keep its mission to raise global prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value front and center.
“Circle isn’t a technology company that happens to have a mission,” COO Elisabeth Carpenter told a Forbes-MIT event. “We started with a mission. Our technology enables it to become reality.”
