How Are Businesses Applying Digital Currencies? | Anthony Pompliano

What is Circle? And then talk to us about the suite of products that you guys have built for various financial organizations to use.

Yeah, no problem, thank you! Yeah, so Circle is a global financial technology firm. We've been operating in the crypto and digital currency space for about eight years, since 2013. We have built a number of platforms and products.

You know, today we operate the largest regulated dollar digital currency in the world, aka dollar stablecoin, which is USD Coin or USDC, which is about 33 billion in circulation and accounts for a huge amount of the payments, settlement activity, and blockchain transactions, payments, DeFi, and markets, and more and more other types of activities we operate that.

We also provide accounts for businesses that want to be using dollar digital currency and other crypto as a core part of how they hold value in their treasury accounts, as well as payment utility through payment account functionality. We offer that in a number of different ways.

But, you know, we fundamentally offer it as a set of APIs and platforms that developers can build on top of. So whether you're a startup that's building an NFT market or you're an established fintech that wants to build in support for things like stablecoins and crypto into your own products and services, we offer that set of APIs that connect the existing banking system, the card networks, the bank networks, things like that into blockchain-native digital currency, payments, settlement, and treasury kind of services.

And I think the last piece here that I would note in that area is we have a treasury product, which is Circle Yield, which provides a way for businesses specifically that want to allocate dollars into USDC-based lending markets and generate high yield on their dollars and USDC.

And then last but not least, we also operate one of the largest fundraising platforms for startups in the United States, a product called Seed Invest, which has grown quite a bit over the past couple of years. And we're excited about continuing to help startups build and grow their companies, also increasingly using more and more digital-native approaches.

Got it. And Kevin, last week when we talked, you talked a little bit about kind of using these stablecoins to generate yield, like Jeremy was just talking about. Talk to us about what you guys are actually doing with USDC and how does that work?

So I'm actually one of those business accounts on Circle, probably one of the earlier ones. The biggest problem most, let's call them institutional clients, have with USDC is a compliance infrastructure that locks into their systems.

So, you know, my operating company, I'm no different than many millions of businesses. I have a compliance officer because I'm an investor in all kinds of financial services that are issuers. And so, I have to be able to mark to market at four o'clock. My compliance officer has to see the positions and then send that report off to the auditors who are external that would sign those docs and then report to the regulator and the various geographies we operate in.

The trouble with USDC or any stablecoin for me, just a year ago, was what platform can I plug into my compliance department with? Is it going to be a bunch of decentralized systems where I'm trying to convince my auditor that this is compliant? I simply wasn't able to. I could not get them on board for using the traditionally decentralized.

It was only when I met the team at Circle and Jeremy down in February in Florida that we started the dialogue with my own internal compliance and then eventually our auditors. And we're still in the startup test phase. We were actually, you know, putting more and more dollar amounts in to prove that this works and that you can actually do it on a daily basis.

You can open up your accounts, you can see your positions, you can see where you're on or offside. Right now, you know, currently we’re waiting for the regulator to rule on USDC. Right? I'm trying to convince my own compliance department that if you don't want to treat it as money market, then treat it as a stock.

The only reason I'm doing all this work and that I'm involved with this is I have a lot of cash sitting around now because we took— we drew down our commercial real estate portfolio materially over the last year and a half. And our alternative for cash is 21 basis points, which doesn't even beat inflation.

So we are looking for a solution like this, and all the rest of this work is working with compliance and regulators and infrastructure and getting this thing on-side. And so I'm trying to, you know, drag my compliance people and auditors out of the dark into the light on this thing.

And that's the good news. But the even more interesting news is how much of this USDC has grown even since I started. I mean, Jeremy, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're closing in on 30 billion dollars here, and that means there's a lot of people doing the same thing I'm doing. And we're not even, you know, we're not on-side yet, and that means the potential is 100, 200, 500 times bigger.

So that's where we're at. And I think the potential of Circle is huge. I intend to become a shareholder as soon as the already disclosed back, despacks. I'll be part of that pipe, and it's a great business, and I think it's a great solution.

I think we'll know more in the months and years ahead on how USDC grows into a payment system. Jeremy, talk to us about how big it actually is right now.

Yeah, so you, so USDC, I mean just to give you some perspective, the beginning of 2020, right as the pandemic was coming, USDC was about, you know, 400, 500 million in circulation. We 10X last year, so we grew from 400 million to 4 billion in circulation. So January 1st, literally of this year, there were 4 billion USDC in circulation.

Today, we're nosing up against 33 billion USDC in circulation. So on track again for roughly another 10X year of growth this year. And we've seen over a trillion dollars in transactions done with USDC on public blockchains; that's not including all the volume that happens on exchanges and things like that.

So we really have seen extraordinary growth, you know, in that. And as Kevin was saying, you know, people are seeing that stablecoins are an extremely efficient way to settle transactions around the world. In the same way we can exchange data on the internet, we can now exchange value. But, it's also, you know, tapping into these crypto capital markets and the demand that exists for digital dollars in these markets to obviously create these fixed income type opportunities for people with their stablecoins.

Got it. And when you guys start to think about this, obviously individuals is kind of a no-brainer; they can move quickly, they can determine, hey, I want a higher yield. Businesses seem to be becoming interested. Kevin, you're doing a great job kind of highlighting how your business is thinking about it. Is this something where we believe that every corporation that's publicly traded, you know, large sovereign wells, large endowments, foundations, pension funds, etc., they will all start to kind of get in the game here as well?

Or is this something that is more so private market companies and individuals, and that's where we think really kind of the addressable market is?

I mean, I'll touch on part of that. I'm sure Kevin's got great perspective on this too, which, you know, my view here is that the shift to digital currency-based payment and treasury infrastructure, which is essentially to say businesses that connect to the internet, are going to increasingly not just with their digital content and their software and their information services, they're going to move their financial services entirely to internet-native infrastructure.

As that happens, every single internet-savvy business in the world is going to store value in digital currency, is going to transact in digital currency, and is absolutely going to use it as cash management and a treasury-type infrastructure.

So we think the total addressable market is every internet-connected business in the world, from startups to the biggest public companies. More precisely, though, I think today we're seeing, you know, it's an interesting bifurcation. When I look at the kinds of businesses that are signing up for this in the early access period, which Kevin has noted he was the very first customer we signed up, which was pretty cool for this new capability, it is everything.

It's from startups that are crypto-native to significant financial institutions and public market companies and others that are looking at ways in which they can diversify some of their treasury assets. So it's both institutional asset allocators and also mainline businesses that see this as a way to augment what they do with dollars as well.

Kevin, how are you thinking about sizing it for your business? And then how do you think other folks will think about sizing this type of product if they've got large pools of capital but have kind of different structures from a company's standpoint?

I'd like to put a lot more into USDC, but I can't get my guys on board yet for getting past a mandate that we have up to a five percent weighting in equity, and they keep pointing the finger at me saying let the regulator rule on this thing.

Because there has been some discussion in the market regarding stablecoins, and I don't really think that all stablecoins are created equally, but that's a different debate. You know, there's a lot of noise within the crypto community about Tether and other situations. You're well aware of that, Pomp, I know that.

What I would love to have happen frankly is that the regulator, and I'm not speaking for Jeremy, I'm just saying what I'd like to see happen, is simply turn them into a bank, and I can use this as cash alternative to what I would hold on my balance sheet, because I'm not making anything on US dollars. I'm able to lend this or stake it if you wish, whatever you want to call it, and make between 5.8 and 6.2, and in other cases if I wish to leave and use other platforms even more.

But my bigger problem, and I can speak to this from many institutions that I service, the more traditional equity markets at indexing, we need a plug-and-play solution so that, you know, we can just say, okay, let's open an account with Circle. Let's put in, you know, 20 percent of our cash holdings into USDC. Let's use it as a payment system. Let's stake it and get some yield on it that's also in USDC issued. I can convert that back to fiat if I want, but I don't need anybody hassling me.

I want the regulator to tell me I'm okay with it. You know, Jeremy's well able to deal with them, and solve it. I'm basically betting his horse is going to win this race, I guess, and I'll be already set up, and then I can turn the spigot on and put some real dough to work.

Because it's small right now, as we're learning the systems and how it works and how the reporting works, but the demand is going to be huge. And I'm happy to be, you know, the first business account. I'm happy to be the guinea pig, whatever you want to call it. I just wish that we would get some clear clarity, even if it doesn't— even if the regulator didn't have to deal with Bitcoin—not let's leave that alone. Let's just deal with stablecoins, let's get a ruling on that, let's get that worked out, and let me get to work on that because there's no—the train has left the station, this isn't going away, let's get on with it, let's rule on it, let's tell us what the rules are, let's get moving.

And I’ll speak on behalf of Sovereign Index and every— we're all in the same boat on this. I've got two of my brothers here with me.

Or, Guy, Jeremy, what were you saying?

Yeah, I was just gonna chime in on a point there, which is just to say, you know, as I think a lot of people know, we went out of our way to build USDC as a sort of electronic stored value money transmission technology that was sort of the state of the art in terms of how regulation applied to digital currency firms that were doing this kind of activity.

And that's how it's regulated today, which is well understood. It's like your balance in a PayPal account or Stripe or Square or others. And I think it's now really getting much, much larger. And so you've got, you know, the U.S. Treasury Department, you've got the Fed, you've got others sort of saying, okay, at scale, this actually is, you know, ought to be kind of supervised as a banking activity, as a special form of banking activity, stablecoin banking activity.

And we agree with that. And as you know, we are preparing to file for a national digital currency bank charter, and we believe that is the right approach to the kind of cash side of this. And then the other, which is, you know, the lending of stablecoins either can be a bank activity or it can be, you know, structured as securities that are purchased and entered into like other fixed income products.

And that's also how we've structured Circle Yield. It is structured as a note purchase agreement. It is structured as a security, and I think that's an understandable instrument for corporations that are utilizing their cash and capital in different ways.

Got it. I’ve got two of my brothers here. What questions do you guys have?

Hey, Kevin, nice to see you again. Jeremy, nice to meet you. Jeremy, so my question would be people can earn on USDC somewhere between six to seven percent yield, kind of depending on the length of the term. So my question would be how are you able to do that versus traditional lending instruments?

Yeah, it's a great question, and there's actually a good amount of info out there on this on our website and others. So the way to think about this today is the yields on USDC today are driven by demand in the crypto capital markets. And when I say crypto capital markets, I mean all of the different investing, trading, lending, other capital market activity that's happening in digital asset native infrastructure, whether that's on centralized exchanges or on DeFi.

And within that arena, there is a very significant amount of dollar stablecoin borrowing demand. There are, from our perspective, very high-quality institutional borrowers, and these range from asset managers and other forms of asset allocators to hedge funds to OTC firms, electronic markets firms, you know, many, many other institutional market participants who want to borrow dollar stablecoins and put those to work in these markets.

And they're willing to pay high interest rates for that. And they're willing to pay those high interest rates because they're actually generating significantly higher returns, and they can't go to JPMorgan Chase, or they can't go to Goldman Sachs to borrow stablecoins. And so there is this intrinsic market demand that exists, and this has existed for years and years and years.

I operated one of the largest OCC trading desks for a long time, and we borrowed all the time and it was a really powerful way to augment the working capital that you had as a firm. And so that's just going on. It's going on at a much, much larger level now.

There's also a retail dimension to that, which is a lot of the borrowing against protocols like Aave and Compound and others, that's very much individuals. We exclusively lend on a wholesale basis to institutional borrowers.

And I think what also makes the approach that we're taking unique is, a, it's, you know, certainly it's these high interest rates that are, you know, being paid. But secondly, we actually over-collateralize every single loan. So if you're lending a million USDC through us, we're actually getting 1.25 million dollars in Bitcoin collateral against that.

And we're constantly adjusting the amount of BTC based on intraday price movements to ensure that we're always in that 125 percent collateralization. So not only is it a high yield, it's also a secured, over-collateralized asset as well. So I think that also makes it pretty interesting.

John, what questions do you have?

Yeah, nice to meet you both! Hello, Kevin again. So there's about 32 billion USDC in circulation. Can you talk about what actually backs that? And then going forward, will that change at all or be consistent?

Yeah, absolutely. So, just a high level of way to think about this is when we launched USDC over three years ago, we did it and have operated it under, as I described to you earlier, the regulations that exist by banking supervisors throughout the United States, so state money transmission regulation.

So the same regulation that applies to the roughly 35 billion dollars that PayPal holds on its balances, the however many billion that Square holds, and so on.

Same regulations, and those regulations have required us to maintain a one-for-one reserve in dollar-denominated assets that are liquid such that we can always provide that dollar in exchange for an electronic money stored value instrument. So, there is a regulatory framework around this.

We've been examined, audited, and constantly report that both with the banking regulators and our public company owners. And then we took another step, which was to basically every month provide a report—not an audit because you don't get audited every month—but a, an attestation on that in fact we're meeting those obligations and it's on a one-for-one basis with the digital currency units or tokens outstanding.

So we've been doing that for several years. The state laws essentially bind you to a very conservative underlying set of permissible investments. So you're bound to a very, very conservative base of permissible investments, and if you go outside of that, you're breaking the law.

And so we've always been inside of that. Based on market feedback as well as sort of I think where we think regulators are going on this, and this is through what I'll kind of call public sector signaling, policy maker preferences, proposed regulations on stablecoins that we're seeing in the UK and Europe and Singapore and other places, we, where this is going is that stablecoin reserves, if you want to call it that, should be in kind of cash and cash equivalents exclusively.

That is what we're seeing demanded, and that's what we've moved to. So we are a hundred percent in cash and cash equivalents, and we're committed to remain in that position until we see regulations say otherwise.

I mean I think this is going to be a moving target over time as these get to, you know, if it's, you know, half a trillion or trillion dollars of value in these dollar digital currencies. What is the underlying kind of risk, liquidity, fiduciary model that the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury, and others will want to see, that will evolve obviously significantly over time.

But today, just to take a long answer and make it very short, it's a hundred percent in cash and cash equivalents.

Awesome. Kevin, when you think about USDC, we've talked a lot about the yield component and thinking of it almost like an investment asset that you can drive that yield on. Is there a world where if you could convince the partners or the customers or your business transaction participants to take USDC, would you move a material part or 100% of all of your wires and kind of legacy banking infrastructure payments to something like USDC where you could do it more instantaneous, cheaper, faster, etc.?

Yeah, of course I would, but I can't do that now. I mean, let me explain what the potential from my point of view as a user of the product. One of the greatest frustrations that I've articulated over the last couple of years is what I do in foreign markets on equities.

I have an index that involves 50 large-cap European stocks that, unfortunately or fortunately, whatever you want to say, are in three different currencies: Swiss francs, euros, and British pounds. One of the largest friction points for me in rebalancing these indices is the fact that I have to go back and forth through FX costs for friction of FX trading.

If regulators could get behind a digital payment system that would allow me to own the securities in, let's say, USDC at a price that's completely transparent and liquid, I could avoid that friction in perpetuity, and it would be a much more efficient way to do business, to settle in a universal digital currency.

Now, I know that sounds, you know, euphoric, but ultimately we need to get there. And the U.S. dollar today is that currency. It still is. You know, many people speculate its future, but for hundreds of years, it's been the currency that people settle on for all kinds of commodities and services.

It's very inefficient for what I'm doing in these markets to pay these FX costs, which vary by the hour, and I see no value added. And so to me, let's get moving. Let's lead the world in this process and this efficiency.

I hate the idea that our regulator would hold us back against innovation when clearly it's needed. And on the baseline of USDC, which, you know, there are rules for money market funds: when you go to cash in your brokerage account, you get swept, if you wish, into a money market account that has rarely broken a buck.

And there are rules. I see no reason we can't apply that kind of regulatory environment to USDC and, you know, have that settle that way. And of course, I would put more into it because I don't know where rates are going to be once the regulator rules on USDC. They probably go down. You're not going to get six percent anymore because there'll be a flood of institutional demand.

But it's going to be better than what I'm getting on US cash, is my assumption. And in addition to that, could be far more efficient as a payment system across a wide range of different uses. I mean, the use cases here are very broad.

And so, you know, one way to look at it— and I've tried to convince in my own conversations with regulators—and most of us have these ongoing dialogues in our day-to-day business to start thinking about USDC as software, really efficient software.

If you're willing to invest in Microsoft, and I've said this before in Google, why aren't you investing in software that has such promise? And that's basically what, in my view, it's a personal opinion. But when I invest in Circle as a business, I'm investing in software that provides tremendous productivity and efficiency in a business I've been in for decades, financial services.

And the same for the chain, for all of the other investments I'm making in cryptocurrencies, coins, tokens, and you know, blockchain itself. It's software to me, and I think it's a necessary investment. And I hope that our regulators see that we should lead the world in developing these protocols and these standards and help us do so.

Jeremy, one of the big questions that people have in the chat is how does Circle make money? And how does being in cash and cash equivalents 100% until you get that clarity from regulators, how does that affect your ability to make money either positively or negatively?

Yeah, so there are really a few buckets of income for Circle. The first is that USDC infrastructure. So we're the principal operator of that market infrastructure. There's, as noted, 32 going on 33 billion. It's in a very conservative posture, and the best way to think about that is yes, we generate income from that, and it's highly interest rate sensitive, right?

So like other financial services cyclicals, if interest rates rise, there's certainly, you know, more income potential from that piece. But we think of that as really like, you know, we're trying to operate a market infrastructure that everyone can take advantage of.

The second piece is through Circle Account. We monetize in two ways: one is people who take advantage of our yield services and who are lending USDC and generating income, you know, from those interest rates, and spread capture in that. The second is through what we call our transaction services.

More and more businesses want to integrate the existing financial rails with things like USDC and blockchain infrastructure. So we have a broad set of transaction services that connect all those, provide platforms and APIs people can build on top of, and we monetize that based on essentially usage feeds: how much are you using those transaction services, how much are you using that wallet infrastructure, the storage infrastructure, the blockchain infrastructure, and our fiat rails?

So that's another big category of income. So you've got the treasury services, the transaction services, you have USDC, you know, interest income, and then the third is basically we have a take rate for every dollar of capital that we raise for startups.

We've helped startups raise hundreds of millions of dollars; that's growing really nicely; that's a really exciting business, our investment platform, our seed capital platform. And so we have a take rate in that as well, which is another source of income for the company.

Got it. So you’ve got kind of a diversified revenue stream here, which makes a ton of sense. Kevin, when you think about investing in Circle in that pipe—and I know some of these thoughts play out over time—but equity, I'm assuming that you as an investor are thinking about getting that kind of crypto exposure like we talked about last week. That would be an equity investment, which doesn't go in the same bucket as let's say your stablecoin cash position that's generating yield, which may not go in the same bucket as let's say your miner position as well.

And so you're kind of actually, in some weird way, not thinking of crypto as one single bucket but it's actually your stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities. You're actually getting it infiltrated by these companies and technologies across all of those various buckets. Is that a fair way to look at it?

It is fair, but there's also a personal philosophy at play here. You know, when I started my wine business, I didn't own any vineyards. Now I do. I like to eat my own cooking. I like to own the vertical. I like to own the infrastructure that supports the business.

So why wouldn't I want to own a piece of Circle if I'm using USDC? To me, it just makes intuitive sense. And as opposed to making, you know, five or six percent interest on USDC as I lend it out over a long period of time, if USDC becomes a standard—and I hope it will—I'll enjoy the capital gains associated with owning part of the infrastructure.

I have been a stalwart on this. If you're going to get involved in Bitcoin, that is simply one asset. And I am very diversified now into miners, their equities, some of the coins they own. Certainly, why wouldn't I want a piece of Circle if I'm going to be using USDC?

As I said earlier, you have to make a binary decision. And there are many in the financial services market that haven't done the 180 that I have, that have convinced themselves that there is no future in this software technology. There's no future in cryptocurrencies. There's no future in Bitcoin. There's only regulatory hell ahead.

I don't feel that way. I have a completely different view of the world. I see the efficiency, the productivity potential. And for me, if I look at just, you know, the time I spent today at our 10 o'clock deal meeting, 40% of that hour was just looking at the crypto deals that were being shown. We have, we're very fortunate to have very, very large deal flow, and it's almost half of what we look at now—placing bets on all kinds of different approaches, some, you know, in recent times immutable holdings and wonderful, and hopefully Circle soon, and some of the coins we've talked about, the miners we’ve talked about that I own now.

This is going to be a 20% weighting in our operating company, and I've said this before and I'll say it again—call it the 12th sector of the S&P. That's what this is. And in my compliant world, I can own up to 20% of this sector and be compliant, and that's where I'm going.

End of this year, seven. We'll see what happens next year, but Pomp—included in that 20 percent are equities, coins, tokens, chain developers, you name it. You know, it's just—it’s the 12th sector of the S&P, but nobody's called it that yet.

You come on here and you tell us, and flex—you got a winery, and then you tell us the 12th sector. I mean, you are all time! We're gonna have to bring you on like once a week.

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