Less than 48 hours until @arc comes to life with support from leading wallets, DeFi primitives, infrastructure providers, and institutions on day one. 9/16 will mark a defining moment not just for how value is moved on the internet, but for the financial system as a whole. The economic operating system will be live for the world to build upon. This is the culmination of over a decade of work, learnings, mistakes, relationships, and so much more — not just from @circle, but from hundreds of partners and users. The real work begins on 9/16, but it is incredibly special to recognize in real time that this is truly the crescendo of over a decade of progress moving value across internet rails, setting up the next century and beyond for both humans and agents alike. Spending the last 4+ years at Circle and working on Arc since last summer has had a lasting impact on broadening my time horizon and confidently doubling down on opinionated bets. @arc is amazing for today, but it will be even more incredible for the future — we’re thinking in decades, and this endeavor’s value proposition and impact will only strengthen in the fullness of time. Circle set out to raise global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value, and we finally have a world-class, bespoke operating system to supercharge that mission. Here’s to the future, built on the economic OS 🏌️‍♂️

It’s wishful thinking that authoritarian governments will play by our self imposed rules if the progress of AI is rapidly advancing to the point where it will “cause significant harm” to the human race

Doug is a long-time colleague and extraordinary at what he does, and this was a terrific conversation. Toward the end of the interview, he recalled hearing me turn down a company and said, “The founders are going to walk away from this thinking they won the lottery. I was always an admirer of how he (Jim) could do that.” I’ve always tried to pass on companies with as much grace and thoughtfulness as possible, as well as give the reasons why. The founders we meet are so often universally high-quality people taking on something incredibly difficult. Like many of the very best Venture Capitalists, we have always felt that they deserve respect, whether or not we ultimately invest. There’s also an important element of humility in saying no. Investors get things wrong, companies evolve, and circumstances change. If I missed something, I always want to be able to revisit the conversation with a founder and, hopefully, find a way to work together down the road. This has occurred many times, and with some of our best deals.

Circle 🤝 @ChelseaFC USDC is coming to global football. Circle is proud to partner with Chelsea FC, one of the most recognized football clubs in the world. Beginning with the 2026/27 season, Circle and USDC will appear on the front of Chelsea’s Men’s, Women’s, and Academy shirts. The global game. The global digital dollar.

Launching out of stealth Drop started as a side project around a simple idea make it easy for anyone to sell food. 1. Cook + post 2. Customers purchase through a link 3. Get paid in stablecoins + customers pick up their food But there’s a bigger shift happening underneath it. Food has gotten expensive. Restaurant prices are up, the Uber Eats / DoorDash tax adds another layer, and the cost of living keeps going up. At the same time people are buying incredible food directly from home cooks and small sellers they discover on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Marketplace and WhatsApp. The problem is these sellers are running their businesses through DMs, spreadsheets, Venmo/Zelle and a patchwork of tools designed for traditional restaurants. They need something much lighter. I think there’s an opportunity to build the operating system for the next generation of mom and pop food businesses, starting with payments, pre orders and CRM, and eventually becoming their neobank. We’ve have ~30 sellers use Drop while in stealth. It’s now getting to the point where I want to take it much more seriously. I’m looking for a pre idea startup of exceptional people who have experience in payments + restaurants/food and want to take this over and apply to Alliance

Time to head to Texas or Nevada. Staying is adding unnecessary risks for your shareholders. You should act in your shareholders best interest and flee Delaware. Delaware is no longer consistent. They are targeting companies they don't like.

CT missed the most important earnings call of the week. It wasn't a crypto company. It was @Cloudflare Everyone caught the wallet announcement. The real alpha was in the call itself. Today Cloudflare monetizes the internet through subscriptions: security services, AI platform spend, pools of funds. A mix of SaaS and IaaS economics. The CEO was explicit that AI agents are about to break that model. Cloudflare sits in front of roughly 20% of internet traffic. Here's what that traffic looks like from the call: - AI agent requests up 1,700% YoY - Agents crossed 50% of total network traffic this quarter. First time in history non-human traffic is the majority. Management admitted it happened faster than their own models - Their projection: if trends hold, non-human traffic outnumbers human traffic 1000x within 5 years The monetization shift is the key part. The ad-supported internet doesn't work when the visitor is an agent. Cloudflare's CEO answer: block malicious bots for free, charge good agents a tiny fee per request. Fractions of a penny. They want to be the ones defining that layer. Now the throughput math here: - Cloudflare handles ~500M requests per second - They estimate 1 to 10% is monetizable via micro/nanotransactions - That means 10M TPS on day one, scaling to 100M TPS Visa peaks at ~20k TPS The CEO's framing: "we're building this while others compete with Visa." Three to four orders of magnitude beyond card rails. No existing payment network can settle this. It has to be something new. Two conclusions I keep coming back to: - Being short L1 throughput is being short agentic workflows. If agent traffic gets monetized per request, the settlement layer needs to scale orders of magnitude beyond anything live today. - The fee math for L1s flips. Base fees have collapsed across ETH, SOL, everywhere. MEV is getting internalized by apps. Hard to build a base fee revenue case at human scale. But at 10M TPS and $0.001 per transaction, you're looking at ~$315B a year in base fees alone. At 100M TPS the number gets silly. Stablecoins and crypto are the end-game here for Agentic finance @jerallaire @circle

Circle Q2: Continued growth and profitability, growing USDC utility, liquidity, and partnerships. OCC National Trust Bank secured. Arc mainnet launches Sept 16, with major firms joining Arc. CPN seeing rapid qtr growth. The internet financial system is arriving.

AI agents are moving from executing narrow tasks to holding discretion over balance sheets. @gordonliao discusses why the rails those agents transact on will define the next five to ten years of finance.

My colleague Abi recently demonstrated the latest @arc privacy version to a packed room at Stanford. He showcased some key features of Arc Privacy Sector including: shielding/unshielding assets, deploying privacy-enabled smart contracts, reading private data, and so much more.

since I'm a non conformist at heart, I thought that it would be a good idea to get married internationally in Tuscany over multiple days with family and friends highly recommend it