JD Durkin: Joining us now live on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Dante Disparte. He is Chief Strategy Officer, Head of Global Policy & Operations at Circle. Welcome back. Nice to see you, as always.
Dante Disparte: Great to be here. Thank you.
JD Durkin: Let’s start with some big news for the team at Circle. As recently as just a week ago, I believe you launched Arc alongside BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard. What did you build, and why those particular partners?
Dante Disparte: Well, look, for so many big global institutions, the blockchain domain has been inaccessible for a lot of reasons. Arc is the blockchain that answers that.
Number one, we have a number of partners, BlackRock, DTCC, some of the biggest banks in the world, Visa, Mastercard, to build an institutional blockchain that will work at scale.
The other thing that, of course, a lot of blockchains lacked until now was the preservation of privacy, but also a critical acknowledgment of the oncoming AI-powered economy. And so Arc is built for the future, and we’re very excited to have a lot of partners with us designing and building Arc.
JD Durkin: And congratulations on that. What does that AI-powered future really look like, and what does the new iteration of AI payments actually look like to you?
Dante Disparte: Well, if you think about it today, most of your and my life, and certainly every preoccupation here on the New York Stock Exchange floor, is us working for money. But with the advent of regulated stablecoins, we have a form of money that can work for us.
And this is true because it exploits the opportunity of programmability, composability and divisibility of digital money. And so there’s nothing more powerful, frankly, in front of us than to give your AI-powered agent a digital dollar like USDC, and then that agent can now carry out activities on our behalf.
Really big breakthrough in payments, micropayments, streaming payments. A whole host of things get unlocked once you connect these dots.
JD Durkin: Not everyone who watches the show knows, we’ve been basically talking about the failure of the CLARITY Act to pass that procedural vote in the Senate nearly every day here on the show.
How big of a potential headwind is that for you? Or was the GENIUS Act, at least for now, maybe enough to continue moving the ball down the field?
Dante Disparte: Right. Well, look, the GENIUS Act, which was passed a year ago, it is now in full force as of July—sorry, January of next year—was existential to the category of regulating payment stablecoins and also critical to American national security.
The CLARITY Act is also important because it would address the other swim lanes of digital assets. What’s a security? What’s a commodity? And where the barriers between the SEC and the CFTC exist?
What we saw the morning after the CLARITY Act failed to pass this round, but it will have its other shot in court, is that the SEC and the CFTC have jointly issued their own proposed rulemaking and their own guidance on how to continue in this market category.
So I’m not in the doom camp here. I think I’m very optimistic, as are we at Circle, about the future of tokenization more generally in capital markets.
JD Durkin: I have about a minute left. You won a federal trust charter. You bought JPM and IBM’s patent portfolio. What is the strategy underpinning all of that?
Dante Disparte: Right. Well, so one of the major announcements that we made was the intent to acquire a company called Cape. Circle powers something called the Circle Payments Network. Think of it like SWIFT, but for tokenized money, for lack of a better expression.
And that acquisition of Cape gives us on- and off-ramps across the world and connectivity to the banking system in a host of jurisdictions. We’re very excited about that. We want stablecoins to be connected to the stream of commerce. We’re building the infrastructure that makes that possible.
JD Durkin: My interviews with you are always so crisp, so good. I learn so much just from a few brief minutes. That’s all the time I have, but I’m really grateful for your time. It’s nice to see you.
Dante Disparte: Thank you so much.
JD Durkin: Come back and see us anytime. Dante Disparte, Chief Strategy Officer, Head of Global Policy & Operations at Circle.
