The Future of Centre Consortium

This week on the Money Movement, Circle CEO and Centre board member, Jeremy Allaire, will welcome to the show Centre's new CEO, David Puth, along with Coinbase CFO and Centre board member, Alesia Haas to discuss the future of the consortium and USDC.

As USDC near 3 billion in circulation and businesses around the world adopt digital dollars, Jeremy, David and Alesia will share thoughts on the significance of this milestone and roadmap for the fastest-growing US dollar stablecoin.

And building on that momentum, Jeremy will be joined by Visa Head of Crypto, Cuy Sheffield, to talk about the newly announced partnership between Circle and Visa and what this means for USDC.

Listen now to hear about what plans Centre Consortium has for the future!

Jeremy Allaire: Hello. I'm Jeremy Allaire. This is The Money Movement, a show where we explore the issues and ideas driving this brave new world of digital currency and blockchains.

It's been a very big week for USDC. Some significant milestones. Just earlier this week, USDC crossed 3 billion in circulation, marking nearly 500% growth over the preceding 9 or 10 months, and that's across multiple blockchains. We saw a couple of significant announcements this week. Circle and Visa announcing a multifaceted partnership really centered around USDC and its use to support a broad range of new payment use cases, and a major boost to Centre, the consortium behind USDC with the appointment of David Puth as CEO.

We're going to explore all of this today with incredible guests, Cuy Sheffield, who is Visa's head of crypto, David Puth, newly appointed Centre CEO, and Alesia Haas, who is a board member for Centre Consortium, as well as the CFO of Coinbase.

I'm going to kick things off with a discussion about the Circle and Visa partnership news. I'm really excited to welcome Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto for Visa, which appears to be an increasingly high-profile role for the story of payments giant.

Welcome, Cuy.

Cuy Sheffield: Great to be here. Thanks, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Absolutely. I thought, first, I just wanted to highlight some of the big items from our announcement, and then we can drill into that a bit for folks. Just high level, we announced a partnership, Circle and Visa together, to bring the benefits of stablecoins to businesses worldwide. At the core of this, is this goal to enable businesses around the world to take advantage of the combined strength of USDC, which as we know is a fully reserved digital dollar stablecoin, supported on multiple public blockchains, and combine that with Visa's global payments platform and network. It's obviously been a big year for stablecoins, and you've been paying very close attention.

The three key pieces on the partnership that we can talk about here, I think the first is we're taking Circle business account, which is a new payment banking type account that is digital currency native, stablecoin native, and we're enabling a corporate card on that, which will enable corporations, their employees, to store value in USDC, and spend value in USDC with more than 60 million merchants worldwide who accept Visa, and Circle is the first crypto firm to announce a corporate card.

The second piece is something I'm very excited about, which is this introduction of a seamless stablecoin based, USDC based payouts experience that's tightly connected to a rapidly growing network of Visa partner wallets. Visa has become the card network of choice for digital currency wallets over 25 approved card programs. Using Circle APIs, businesses will be able to automate, with a seamless user experience both for the business and payee, a seamless experience with the settlement infrastructure, all being built on USDC, and ultimately delivering value to those users' wallets which they can, in turn, spend at Visa point-of-sale as well.

Then together, working with these on educating and enabling Visa's global network of hundreds of FinTech partners in the FinTech Fast Track Program, and select marketplaces around the world who are looking to take advantage of digital dollar stablecoins, global scale payouts, taking advantage of this integration that we're doing, and the work that we're doing together.

That's the high level. Obviously, it's been a pleasure working with you on this over the preceding months. Maybe, it'd be great just to hear from you, Cuy. We'd love to hear you talk through this from a Visa perspective. Maybe, if you could, just start with the broader approach and thesis and how you arrived at this Visa approach to stablecoins and USDC.

Cuy: Yes, sure. First off, we're incredibly excited about the partnership with Circle. When most people think about Visa, they think about the retail card network, but increasingly, we're really becoming what we call a network of networks, where we want to participate and add value to every transaction, whether it's consumer to business, business to consumer, or business to business. We see Visa as really becoming a single point of access for clients to move value over VisaNet or over new networks that emerge in the future. Public blockchains and digital currencies, like USDC, are really just additional networks. We think that there's an important role for us to play to be a bridge between new digital currency wallets and our network of 60 million merchants across the world, as well as to explore how payment innovations like digital currencies can enable new payment flows.

Over the past year, we've really been closely following the growth of the stablecoin ecosystem. We've seen USDC emerge with this really vibrant global developer ecosystem. It's amazing to see the activity and excitement from developers across the world, really with a range of use cases that they're looking to build on it. We're seeing interest from clients and FinTechs and businesses in digital currency wallets and the potential to be able to use USDC. It was natural for us to want to partner with the leading platforms like Circle to help figure out how we can bring our products and services in our network to Circle's clients, and enable additional value and utility for USDC.

Jeremy: It's awesome. Maybe just talk a little bit about-- We're building this partner wallet network that can connect businesses and the funds they have, marketplaces that are sellers or suppliers or others, and connect them to these digital wallets around the world. Talk about the build-out of that network of wallets, what that represents in terms of an opportunity for e-commerce firms in particular.

Cuy: Over the past year, what we've really done is we've gone out and we've partnered with the leading consumer-facing wallets to help them be able to issue Visa credentials. We want to work with every regulated digital currency wallet across the world. We've established Visa as the leading card network for digital currency wallets. Next is what can we do with that network, and how can we add additional value to them. We started looking at, what are payment use cases and new payment flows that stablecoins like USDC could potentially power for businesses. We think things like cross-border payouts and disbursement could be one of these really interesting flows to explore.

In order to be able to have a broader set of clients to be able to leverage something like USDC to be able to make payouts, you need to have a few things. First, they need to have really good business-facing, developer-facing APIs where they can originate those payouts. That's what we saw Circle's platform starting to provide. Then you also need to have endpoints where those payouts can be received. As we onboard the dozens of digital currency wallets onto our network, we want to help Circle's clients be able to identify, here are wallets that are the leading wallets in each market that are approved by Visa to issue card programs, and then be able to initiate payments that flow over a blockchain in USDC to those wallets.

Then the last piece is, once someone receives a USDC payout to a wallet, whether they're business, whether they're consumer, you need to have offerings. You need to have an easy way to be able to spend that value. Because of the work that we're doing with digital currency wallets across the world to issue visa credentials, we think that if you can enable payouts to them, you have this easy way to suspend USDC once it arrives.

Jeremy: It's awesome and exciting. I think to talk a little bit more about the substance there so people understand, with this solution that we're creating to support this, what we're really trying to do is abstract away a lot of the complexity that exists for the average person or the average business in using something like USDC as a settlement rail. I might be a seller on a marketplace, and I've got a balance, and I want to receive my payment for my work that I did, or for something I sold. I want to be able to just connect and link a wallet that I have, that then becomes connected to the seller, basically, and have the payment happen over a USDC settlement rail.

The user doesn't actually need to even know which blockchain they're using. If the wallet happens to support a high-speed, efficient USDC chain, they could use that. They don't need to know about what public addresses they're using. It allows for a seamless experience where they can link their wallet, receive the payout. They don't need to know about the plumbing, as it were. What happens is, the beauty of USDC, is a nearly instant settlement at virtually no cost with a global reach. That under the hood will get abstracted away and made much easier for the end customer who's receiving that payout.

Cuy: Absolutely. I think one of the fascinating things about public blockchains in USDC, is they are really lowering the barrier to entry for developers to build digital currency wallets across the world. We're seeing hundreds of these different wallets emerge, and there's a really wide range of the level of compliance programs, the consumer experience, the cybersecurity of those wallets. We think that there's an important role for Visa to play to help to identify who are the wallets that large businesses and platforms could be comfortable making payouts to, and then be able to identify and leverage circle services to be able to actually payout to those wallets in USDC.

Jeremy: We're obviously providing treasury infrastructure that's USDC native that Fintechs themselves could build on top of if they want to add support for that in their own products as well. The big picture here, I think, as we talk about this, I think a lot of people when they hear Visa and stablecoins, they immediately go to, "I'm going to be using my crypto wallet to scan a QR code at a Visa point of sale to use my stable coin right there." We'll get there maybe at some point.

This is really about the not sexy, but absolutely enormous scale of business payments that happened in the world today. I think you shared some remarkable numbers with me about business payments that happen with older forms of electronic money, and what the scale of that looks like. Can you just talk about the scale here, because I think it's really important?

Cuy: Yes. There's still over $120 trillion of B2B payment flows that are mostly made by check and wire transfer. We're really interested to see if new innovative technologies like stablecoins can contribute to a trend of B2B payment monetization, and to help digitize some of these flows. I think that there's a bigger opportunity to figure out how to solve some of these problems that businesses face for cross-border payouts, that stablecoins can be uniquely positioned to solve, then there is just as another way that someone can buy their coffee. Visa is both a way to pay and a way to increasingly get paid. We want to explore any new technology that can help with B2B payments in addition to consumer commercial payments.

Jeremy: That's great. It's a good segue into maybe my last question, which is, talk about a little bit your vision for public blockchain-based, crypto bear asset, digital currencies, what can that look like, what does that look like at scale, how does that interact with Visa net? Just a big picture of you a little bit here as we think out in the coming years.

Cuy: I think the core innovation of digital currencies is they're not in Fiat-backed digital currencies is, it's not a new currency, it's a new form factor of an existing currency. It's a way to represent Fiat as a digital bearer asset, and be able to transfer that representation of Fiat over a number of emerging new open-source public networks. We think that Visa should be currency and network agnostic. We have clients across the world that are looking to use these new form factors and these new networks. We want to make sure that they can be integrated into the existing payment system in a secure and convenient and compliant manner. We plan to continue to expand our network of networks over time, and we want to partner with the leading digital currency platforms and providers that help make sure that they can connect to our solutions.

Jeremy: Well, it's a truly tremendous sky. It's been wonderful putting together this partnership with you, very excited to see what we can do together and grow USDC use cases. Thanks again, and thanks for joining on the show today as well.

Cuy: Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: Absolutely.

The other major event this week around momentum for USDC, and the consortium behind it, was the appointment of David Puth as Centre CEO. We're incredibly blessed to have David join us with Alesia Haas, another board member from Centre, also the CFO of Coinbase, to talk about the future of Centre Consortium.

Welcome, David and Alesia.

David Puth: Thank you, Jeremy.

Alesia Haas: Glad to be here.

Jeremy: Excellent. So nice to have you guys here. I wanted to kick off the conversation with just a little bit of backdrop on Centre. Not everyone in the world is familiar with Centre Consortium, obviously, people who are really close to our industry are.

The quick overview of Centre Consortium, this is a consortium co-founded by Circle and Coinbase in 2018, really with a mission and a vision to bring fiat standards for fiat digital currency, which are now called stablecoins, into the world, and to create both the open-source technology so that those could exist as open-source technical standards, but then also the governance that's needed, the governance of the technical standards, the policies that are needed to provide for security around issuance, provide for the reserve management that's needed to make stablecoins trustworthy and transparent. The compliance rules needed to be operating these kinds of issuing infrastructures.

Of course, the first stablecoin introduced by Centre Consortium was USD coin or USDC. That's where we started, and there's a lot there. I encourage anyone who's not familiar to go to centre.io and download the white paper from two years ago, and you'll see that we're still just at the start of executing on the vision for Centre.

That obviously leads us to today where after an extensive search, looking for the right senior executive leader, we are so privileged to bring on David Puth as Centre CEO.

Welcome to the job, David.

David: Jeremy, thank you. Jeremy and Alesia, thank you. I couldn't be more enthused about joining, and particularly joining this week with the announcement of the visa partnership, but also the explosion of volume that has taken place with USDC over the course of this year. My timing of joining feels very fortuitous. I feel very privileged to be part of this organization. I thank you and the Centre Board for inviting me to be part of this opportunity.

Jeremy: Thank you, David. Let's talk a little bit about your journey, the work that you've done, and how that led you into this space and this specific opportunity.

David: Well, I appreciate that opportunity to share that. If I look [inaudible 00:19:42] I believe [inaudible 00:19:49]

Jeremy: We got a little frozen earlier.

David: -was spent and involved in market businesses. Derivatives-- Pardon me?

Jeremy: We had an audio hiccup. It's okay. Keep going.

David: Okay. The bulk of the early part of my career was spent involved in market businesses, derivatives, some equities, emerging markets, commodities, but a constant throughout that time was my work with currencies. That eventually led me to running the company CLS, which is the largest payment and settlement network in the world, processes over $2 trillion a day in international foreign exchange flows. If I put those two businesses together, a very logical next step would be to move into this universe and take both my market experience, as well as my payment and settlement experience, and come to probably the only organization that I could bring those skills and hope to take business to the next level.

Jeremy: That's great. CLS is obviously an incredible important infrastructure in the world. It's not a household name like Visa, but it's certainly, as we talk about these trillions and trillions of dollars that slosh around in the movement of currency in the world, CLS is a key one. CLS was a consortium, a consortium of members. It was also an organization that worked with central banks, and as you look at sort of the fundamentals of how currency works in the world. Touch a little bit on the consortium side of it and what that looked like.

David: CLS was born out of solving a problem to enable safe settlement with international currency flows. It was a private effort that received a great deal of attention from the [inaudible 00:21:47] 70 members of consortium enabled, truly enabled the rapid growth of the foreign exchange market to where it is today. The engagement with regulators was quite extensive. CLS is overseen by 22 central banks around the world, primary regulator being the federal reserve. In many ways, it has some similarities to what we're trying to build at Centre. From a regulatory perspective, I think we're quite a bit different, but the consortium element and the network element of bringing disparate parties, at times, competitive parties together to work for the common good of building this network, is something that I see very similar to what we're trying to accomplish with the Center Consortium.

Jeremy: That's great. That's very helpful, obviously, an important factor as we thought about. The future of how currency works in the world, how movement and value works in the world, obviously you've got quite a bird's eye view on that.

I want to come back to Centre and the future of Centre, but first I want to also introduce Alesia. Just a little history here which is, I've had the pleasure of working with Alesia for the past couple of years. I think one of the most important executives and leaders at the storied firm, Coinbase, and obviously, Alesia, I just wanted to thank you for everything you and Coinbase have done for Centre and USDC. Thank you.

I want to talk a little bit about your own background and journey. How did you progress into crypto, and then of course, what brought you and Coinbase into the co-founding of Centre Consortium back when we put this together in 2018?

Alesia: Sure. I'll focus mostly on Coinbase and Centre. My own journey is one that I grew up in financial services, and just saw the opportunity for crypto to transform how we interact with financial assets and money, and thought there was a huge opportunity to do things more efficiently, faster and cheaper. That really ties closely to USDC because when we had the opportunity, Jeremy, to partner with Circle and bring forth the Centre Consortium, what Coinbase saw was really the opportunity for a stable asset that was compliant, that was accessible. We really valued a digital programmable dollar that had ubiquity and the ability for many different parties, and as David just alluded to, oftentimes competitors to plug into one network.

We view that stablecoins have the same function as a US dollar, but they're faster, cheaper, and smarter. We view that this has the opportunity to really transform many different payment processes on a global basis, much like Visa [unintelligible 00:24:20] season it as well. We believe this is one of the important building blocks of the future of finance. We were excited to join you to be a very compliant first model and ensure that we provided the safety and security to all of our users to be able to transact with stable coins and USDC specifically.

Jeremy: Awesome. Thank you. Maybe turning to Centre and the future of Centre a bit here, David, as you come on board, it would be great to hear you talk about what you'd like to see develop for Centre in the next year.

David: I start with, again, the number one goal is to continue the steady growth path that frankly, the explosive growth path USDC has been on the course of the year building on multiple chains and continuing to expand both the user base and the number of use cases around the world. If I start there, there's a lot to do and a lot to build. USDC has clearly been adopted by many different users, and my goal to continue that process.

Additionally, we'll be adding people and processes to help support that effort where we have a strong goal of bringing comparably strong members to the consortium to add to what Circle and Coinbase have been able to do. Bringing people building those control processes that will be helpful to enable the consortium to be recognized worldwide as the leading stablecoin. Then eventually moving into using what we've done to build USDC to launch future stablecoins around the globe and other currencies. There is no shortage at all of things that I hope to accomplish in the next year, and hope very much to be sitting here a year from now and talk about the fact that we've been able to cover a lot of those goals.

Jeremy: I'm going to put it on the calendar. That's awesome. There's a lot to do, obviously, and what you've outlined is significant, and we're excited to see you build it.

Alesia, I know from our extensive work together, you're incredibly passionate about the growth of USDC itself. I'd love to hear you talk about what you think can drive that growth in the next year.

Alesia: Oh, we're going to scope just a year. All right.

Jeremy: We're going to come to the long-term in a few minutes.

Alesia: All right. I think over the next year, I hope to see continued growth in DeFi. DeFi or Decentralized Finance, for those who may be newer to crypto, really takes this open financial system a step further, and enables a world where every financial service we use today, whether it's loans or savings accounts, trading, insurance are accessible to anyone in the world on a global basis in a peer to peer way. I think that DeFi, obviously we've seen explosive growth. It's now at 13 billion invested, and this number has more than doubled since the end of Q3 or since August. Huge growth there, and I continue to expect that to grow in the future. That relies heavily on USDC as well.

I also think we're going to see growth in the next year of connecting USDC to other major payment companies, like we just saw with Visa. Consumers are looking for different options. We're hearing that loud and clear through our own customer research where we think that this is becoming a viable method of payment for millions of people on a global base in both the developed and developing economies.

Then as I think about towards the end of next year, I hope that we're going to start to see expanded use cases, payments, FX treatments, dollarization, potentially more distribution of aid like we're starting to see now, cross border payments. I think when I look at those opportunities, there's so many middlemen and expensive payment types, long settlements and friction. I think that USDC can eliminate a lot of that pain point that we see. I hope to see a lot of use cases on the emerging side, and maybe not contributing to a ton of growth, but starting to emerge with those new payment rails.

Jeremy: Yes, absolutely. We're definitely seeing that emerging, it's the early adopters they're coming in with it, and it'll be fascinating to see. I think this theme of connecting major payments companies is a really important one. I think part of the investment that we've made as Centre is making sure that USDC can scale to support consumer scale use cases, hundreds of millions of users with tens of thousands of transactions per second. There's a lot of work we're doing obviously to improve that, make that possible.

I want to turn a little bit to a subject that's been actually in the news this week as well. I won't talk about the news, but I'll talk about the subject, which is really this sort of emerging legal and regulatory framework for stable coins. This has really become a major theme, global supernational, players like the FSB opining on it, the bank of international settlements, it's got strong attention, places like the treasury department, central banks around the world. This is a big theme, and David, I think you had to chart a path on this in core, fundamental global market infrastructure, as you noted working with central banks. It would be great to just talk a little bit about your experience, the relevance for that. What is relevant and what's in store for stablecoins as we go from a relatively small size today to potentially handling trillions of dollars in assets and payment volumes in the coming year.

A little bit about that experience, and then also, what's different? What do you see as you look at this that's different about stablecoins compared to traditional regulated market infrastructure?

David: Yes. Thank you. It's a fairly complex question because the difference today between operating a highly regulated financial institution as CLS is, and one that operates with almost an entire focus on safety and soundness. What the Internet has provided us with, and this technology that has been built, has provided us with a whole new means of being able to transfer money. In the same way that we would move an email, we can move financial assets across the internet. It's going to continue to attract a reasonable amount of regulatory attention.

Regulators have not been shy about expressing their views about the stablecoin, it's been written about over the last several years. The BIS in particular has come out and talked about what their expectations are. Certainly, my experience at CFS is one that I'd like to think I can apply to help with the growth of what I expect we will be doing together and growing USDC and future stablecoins. It starts with transparency, and I am very pleased to join an organization where Coinbase and Circle have really set an example, and led by example in the industry, of working very closely with the regulatory community and being very transparent about our activities.

At the same time, it involves a strong process of us engaging in such a way to help the regulatory community understand where the risks are similar, to those that might exist in traditional money transmission, and where they're fundamentally different, and those differences are very apparent in the way our technology works. I hope very much to draw on the experience and draw on our connectivity with the regulatory community to work together to ensure they have [inaudible 00:31:49] in our system [inaudible 00:31:52] will be hundreds of millions of users on our system going forward. In order to do that, the faster and bigger we grow, the more regulatory attention we'll attract, and I fully expect that we'll be able to work closely with policymakers and regulators to ensure and instill in them the confidence that they need to be able to support the growth of our systems.

Jeremy: It's a big job, but I completely see it, and we're excited to have you working on it with us.

Alesia, I know you and Coinbase are incredibly passionate about how this technology can lead to this open financial system. I guess, what does that look like to you? Also, how can the so-called global stablecoin arrangements, the FSB terminology, such as Centre, which is a global stablecoin arrangement, how can that work hand in hand with policymakers, regulators, central banks, in a way that we can preserve and enable this vision of an open financial system?

Alesia: Sure. To say it bluntly, and Coinbase's mission is to create an open financial system, and that promise is to make money and payments universally accessible, no matter where they are, and USDC definitely helps enable that vision. The way that Centre needs to work with regulators and central banks to ensure that we can execute on that vision, is to first and foremost start with education. There is a lot of misnomers in stablecoins today. There's also, as you know, Jeremy, and David as well, there's just a breath that there's different permutations of stablecoins, and USDC is differentiated amongst that universe because it is very thoughtfully constructed, to be compliant, and to intersect with the traditional banking network and the central bank.

One, I think we need to educate all regulators on how Centre has been constructed to support [inaudible 00:33:51], and also how it is innovating and creating new opportunities to bring an open financial system to all users. It is a model that CBDCs can follow. It is a thoughtfully constructed model to protect consumers and to enable transparent and reliable payment rails while using established banks to hold the regulated audited US Dollars backing the USDC. More than anything, we need to just meet with people, we need to educate, and we need to continue to evolve the model to ensure that it meets the global regulatory frameworks that will be sure to come forth in the coming years.

Jeremy: Yes, it's been fascinating how fast some of these topics have really come to the fore. We're getting outreach from projects and central banks all around the world who are saying, how do we do this, and how do with the private sector? How do we do it with private sector issuers, this model that we've been able to drive with USDC, can be a model that can work around the world. It'll be interesting.

David, just under your leadership, you're not only going to be taking on more members, but you're going to be building up the staff considerably. What are some of the critical areas of focus, as you build out the team at Centre, and for our listeners, if you know people in these areas, we're obviously going to want to hear from you, but just talk a little bit about how you're building this out.

David: The simple message [inaudible 00:35:28], is we're open for business, and we're hiring, and we're very excited about building a world-class team to support a world-class product. The work that Circle and Coinbase have done to establish the foundation for Centre is quite evident, and I've seen that in my first few days of operating here. Building out a technology fund is supportive of the work that our consortium members are doing, will be part of job number one, a very strong regulatory affairs team and compliance team that can engage with both our consortium members, the community, and importantly, again, the regulatory community and policymakers. Business development will remain, again, top of the list as I expect we will be expanding into other stablecoins in other countries. We are building a completely decentralized company. I expect that Centre will have employees at various locations around the world as we try to fulfill our mission of trying to bring the stablecoin universe to other parts of the world, and increase financial inclusion in the way that we hope to be able to do so. I am very excited about building the team. It is a very blank canvas today, and one that's very exciting to be looking at it this time.

Jeremy: We'll have folks stay tuned for job descriptions on centre.io, and hopefully that'll be coming soon. It's obviously all very exciting.

As we wrap up here, I want to turn to the future, the way off future, and on the show, I like to ask people about imagining that future a little bit. Let's sit here and imagine what Centre could become. What is the role of stablecoins in the world in 5 or 10 years? What's their scale of usage, and adoption? What could that look like? We'd love to hear from both of you. Alesia, maybe you could start.

Alesia: I will start. I expect, over the next 5 to 10 years, I expect my children to be opening their first bank accounts in stablecoins as opposed to fiat currencies. I think that stablecoins can improve upon fiat visibility and access, and make the system faster, more efficient and reduce the cost of entry. To do this, I think we're going to have to see a smooth integration with the existing financial system, and with that, will come clear regulations frameworks to build trust, protections against fraud and other undesirable activities. We need to have standards at Centre that promulgate the quality, the interoperability, the programmability of these smart contracts to drive growth and acceptance. I expect us to see huge growth in all of those areas over the next 5 to 10 years, broad adoption in the areas, we talked about DeFi, payment rails, usability in all forms of commerce, and I'm excited for this future to build it with you all.

Jeremy: That was great, Alesia.

David, give us your five-year plan.

David: I can only follow on what Alesia said here, in that my children are already opening up their USDC wallets, and I expect that that usage will continue to grow. What I would anticipate, and what I really hope we strive for is to be able to bring the use of stablecoins to emerging and developed markets. We're aware of the fact that there are 3 billion people in the world who are either unbanked or have limited access to the financial resources that we all have grown accustomed to, and I believe that the use of stable coins will help enable some portion of that population to be able to access financial services that just haven't been available to them in the past.

If I had a dream of what five years from now looks like, it will be broad adoption from the domestic and international corporate world, but equally, it will be the initial signs of adoption from less developed countries where people can really use the benefits that stablecoins can bring. I think that would be a great sign of success, and what the future of money really looks like.

Jeremy: Absolutely. We're looking for WhatsApp and WeChat scale adoption. I think it's on the horizon. Well, David and Alesia, such a great pleasure to have you on the show today, and of course, very, very excited about continuing to build all this out together. Thank you so much for joining today.

David: Thank you.

Jeremy: Significant week again, in the realm of digital currency and blockchains, and specifically for USDC. Major milestones with Circle visa partnership, what that means for the integration of USDC into a dramatically broader set of use cases in the world of payments and commerce. This tremendous news of David Puth joining Centre as CEO to really take this to the next level and build this new, more open, more inclusive global financial system.

Until next time, stay well, stay safe, and stay informed.

[music ]

[00:41:16] [END OF AUDIO]

Cuy Sheffield
Head of Crypto, VISA
David Puth
CEO, Centre
Alesia Haas
CFO, Coinbase

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