Circle is building the next financial empire. CLARITY will be the seminal moment Stablecoins have moved beyond the question of whether they matter. The debate now is who builds the standard and whether the US creates the conditions for that standard to be built at home. @circle President Heath Tarbert addresses it directly in the latest episode of @s4m_podcast. As @jerallaire makes the case for CLARITY, a new @stripe and @Visa-backed entrant has sharpened the conversation around competition, consortiums and the future shape of digital money. Does more competition threaten @USDC or validate the entire thesis? Can a consortium match an integrated platform on governance, economics and innovation? And what happens when stablecoins move beyond crypto into collateral, clearing and AI-native commerce? There is some useful context here. Circle went from the depths of crypto winter to an IPO a year later. USDC then processed $21.5tn in transactions during the first quarter of this year, while its traditional financial use cases are, in Heath’s words, still at an early stage. Following on from my conversation with Jeremy pre-IPO, this sitdown with Heath is a timely update on the inner workings of Circle, the scale now coming into view and the increasingly important contest to define the internet financial system. New Searching for Mana out now.