The interview has been edited for length
and clarity.
Q. What are the benefits of a digital currency?
What value, for example, does someone get
from USD Coin that they can’t from Venmo or
from other ways of exchanging value?
A. Venmo only works if other people use Venmo.
A Venmo payment may not converse with a Visa
payment or may not converse with a WhatsApp
payment and so on. That’s where the email
analogy goes a long way: How useful would
Gmail be if a Gmail user couldn’t email a user or
Hotmail or Yahoo and so on? What if you could
upload your dollar to the internet, the same way
that you once upon a time uploaded your CDs?
That’s exactly what we have done with the U.S.
dollar in creating USDC, Circle’s digital currency.
It’s to take the dollar, the trust in the dollar, the
buyers’ and spenders’ security around how the
dollar is a currency of choice around the world
and then empowered it with the power of the
internet. USDC is a $35 billion digital currency
and growing. It has cumulatively powered $1.5
trillion worth of transactions.
Q. What kinds of transactions are these?
A. Visa has enabled USDC across 70 million
merchants on the Visa network as a settlement
option. Companies like MoneyGram recently
announced a partnership with USDC to enable
remittances using USDC that have a cash-
in-cash-out point at MoneyGram locations
around the world. So you’re starting to see
this bridge between digital payments and real
world payments.