Jeremy Allaire, CEO at Circle Internet Financial, says that the next major pillar of the Fintech firm’s strategy is Web3 services.
Last year, Circle made an acquisition of a crypto infra platform called Cybavo. This week, the company has launched the first new product milestone with their Programmable Wallets offering.
The Next Major Pillar of Circle’s Strategy: Web3 Services
Last year, @circle made an acquisition of a crypto infra platform called @cybavo.
This week, we launched the first new product milestone with our Programmable Wallets offering.
A thread on our strategy: 🧵
— Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) August 11, 2023
Allaire noted via social media that they’re best known for stablecoin USDC, which has “become an important building block for using dollars on the internet.”
Allaire also mentioned that when USDC launched, it was “during the early phases of DeFi, and the idea of programmable money and money lego bricks was just emerging.”
The firm thought about USDC as “an API for developers and a building block, and that eventually any application or internet service could build money into their apps easily.”
He added that in 2018 and 2019, blockchain infrastructure was immature, and developing and deploying apps “was extremely difficult.” Building and integrating wallets and smart contracts safely, and deploying and managing blockchain infra “was hard and risky.”
Jeremy Allaire further noted that the market for this “was pretty small, though USDC got strong PM/Fit with on-chain protocol developers, and was able to ride the wave of innovation through 2020/2021.”
But like past cycles, Circle claims it now “seeing massive improvements in blockchain infrastructure, with innovative L1s and an exposure in Ethereum L2 innovation. One part of our strategy has been to take sure that USDC can be natively issued and moved across all these layers.”
Jeremy Allaire also shared:
“We now see that Web3 is poised to become mainstream. We’re going through the dial-up to broadband moment, with scalability, usability, and safety all becoming much much better. It seems clear that nearly every major consumer internet company, brand and enterprise will start integrating Web3 primitives into their services. And nearly every fintech, payment company and financial institution will use Web3 for tokenization, payments, and financial apps. To get there, we need way more developers who can build Web3 apps. There are 100 million developers today, and only 500k active Web3 developers. That’s 0.5% of the market.”
He added:
“Building Web3 apps is hard, and making end-user experiences for Web2 users is challenging, especially across different chains. Building and deploying smart contracts, and safely operating them across chains is difficult, and not something most companies are ready to do. At the same time, we know that we are in the super early stages of growth in wallets and stablecoins. There are 3 billion existing digital wallets across a wide array of Web2 products and services. We estimate that there are 80M Web3 wallets. That’s < 3% penetration.”
He also noted:
“We’re also super early with stablecoins. With $120B in supply, that’s a tiny fraction of the market for electronic dollars, which is nearly $25T. Some analysts think we might see $3T in dollar stables in the next 5 years. Whatever the number, it’s likely to grow massively. We need to grow the number apps and services that use Web3, which will grow the number of wallets that can use stablecoins and NFTs. And we need to put the growth in apps created and deployed on a non-linear growth curve. That’s where developers and Web3 services come-in.”
He pointed out that just like AWS “ushered in non-linear growth in how fast startups and enterprises could deploy and safely operate software, Web3 Services will drive non-linear growth in how fast developers can build, deploy and safely operate Web3 apps. It’s a massive opportunity.”
That’s why they have “built and launched Circle Web3 Services, and our very first service, Programmable Wallets.”
With Programmable Wallets, developers comfortable “with Web2 development, can quickly and easily bring multichain Web3 wallet experiences into their apps (iOS and Android, Web SDK coming soon).”
He concluded:
“They can on-board users without complex and sometimes scary methods, and enable smooth interactions where users don’t need to own gas tokens or know about which blockchain they are using. We have a pretty exciting roadmap over the fall, aimed at making stablecoin payments super seamless and cross-chain, and introducing a smart contract development platform that will be easy and accessible to traditional Web2 developers. Circle’s mission is to increase global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. Growing the # of apps that connect to Web3, activating billions of wallets with stables and NFTs and enabling the safe use of smart contracts will help to get us there.”