Circle's Jeremy Allaire on USDC surpassing Tether in transaction volume and post-quantum cryptography roadmap

Summary

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire makes two headline claims: USDC has surpassed Tether in transaction volume and is now the most widely transacted digital currency in the world, and Circle is about to become the first blockchain network to launch with post-quantum cryptographic signatures built in from day one.

USDC at scale

Allaire frames Circle as a platform company rather than a stablecoin issuer. Beyond USDC, it issues EURC — the largest digital euro stablecoin — and runs what he describes as the largest tokenized money market product. The platform has widened to include Arc, a blockchain operating system nearing mainnet, and Circle Nano Payments, a new module that lets agents transact at 1 millionth of a cent per transaction.

The transaction volume growth is striking. USDC runs across 32 blockchain networks, and Allaire says the cost to transact on-chain has fallen to fractions of a cent, driving tens of trillions of dollars in annual transaction volume on a monetary base still measured in the hundreds of billions. He expects that monetary base to scale toward trillions as adoption broadens.

Recent enterprise uptake includes Ramp launching full treasury management on USDC and JPMorgan using it to sell digital bonds.

Agentic payments

Allaire's most forward-looking argument is that crypto infrastructure is purpose-built for the agentic economy. The first wave, already underway, is agents consuming services from providers that have become "agent-ready" — built around MCP servers, CLI interfaces, and fast automated onboarding. Circle tracks this through X42, an open standard for agentic payments co-developed with Stripe and Coinbase that recently merged into the Linux Foundation.

X42 transaction volume is currently in the hundreds of millions — small in absolute terms, but Allaire points to the rapid growth in X42-enabled endpoints as the leading indicator. Leaked Anthropic code apparently contained references to X42, which he reads as confirmation the standard is becoming a default pattern at the foundation-model level.

The more explosive growth case, in his view, is agent-to-agent commerce: specialized agents selling services to other agents, with intelligence priced per token. Transactions could range from 5 cents to $100 or more depending on the model and task. Once agents are contracting with each other at scale, he argues, you need machine-written, machine-enforced contracts with automated dispute resolution — and blockchain-based economic operating systems are the only architecture that fits. He sees this as an emergent shift in corporate form itself, where the legal and operational substance of a company is primarily software execution.

On pricing philosophy, Allaire says Circle has always believed the marginal cost of storing and moving value will approach zero over time. The Nano Payments product — 1 millionth of a cent per transaction — is the practical expression of that thesis. The analogy he uses is WhatsApp audio calls: the infrastructure cost is so low that end users will effectively pay nothing, and business models will be built on the monetary base and transaction velocity rather than per-payment fees.

Post-quantum roadmap

Circle announced its full post-quantum cryptography roadmap on the day of this conversation. The core commitment is that Arc, when it goes mainnet, will have post-quantum signatures at the base layer from launch — covering how transactions are signed, published to the network, and how assets are defined. Allaire claims this will make Arc the first blockchain network in the world to launch with post-quantum signatures in place.

The broader challenge he acknowledges is ecosystem-wide. USDC runs on 32 chains, and quantum resilience has to cascade across all of them. Existing networks face a coordination problem that Arc sidesteps by being built clean from the start. The roadmap also addresses how validators on the Arc network achieve quantum resistance over time, but Allaire treats the base-layer signature mechanism as the most critical near-term milestone.

The timing was partly opportunistic: Circle had been building toward this announcement when Google DeepMind published its quantum computing paper, and the external attention accelerated the release.

The macro bet

Allaire is direct that card network transaction volumes will look small compared to what blockchain-settled, AI-mediated commerce will generate — and that the unit economics will be fundamentally different. He frames the current moment as still very early: global real-economy usage of crypto infrastructure is, by his estimate, about 2% of where it will eventually be.