I've started three companies. The first made Flash Player. The second made video streaming. The third makes digital dollars. Each one was about moving something analog to the internet. Money was just the last thing to go.
USDC is backed by Treasuries and cash. Every dollar is accounted for, audited monthly, and redeemable 1:1. We chose boring on purpose. In stablecoins, boring is a feature — not a bug.
When Silicon Valley Bank failed on a Friday and we had $3.3 billion stuck there, USDC depegged to 87 cents. Those were the longest 48 hours of my life. The government backstop on Sunday saved us — and taught us to never concentrate reserves again.
The most valuable thing in crypto isn't Bitcoin or Ethereum. It's a dollar on a blockchain. USDC moves $10 billion a day because people need stable value — not volatile speculation — to actually build financial applications.
We pivoted Circle three times before USDC. Consumer payments, crypto exchange, tokenization — none of them stuck. USDC stuck because it solves a real problem: moving dollars at internet speed. Pivoting is not failure — it's search.
When interest rates went from 0% to 5%, our revenue model went from "how do we survive?" to "how do we manage all this cash?" The same reserves that earned us nothing in 2021 earned us $1.5 billion in 2023. Macro matters.