No Priors

How AI Agents Will Transform the Financial System with Circle Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire

AI agents can already collaborate, but they lack a trustworthy medium in which to store value and execute contracts. Enter Circle’s Arc Blockchain, an economic “operating system” designed for a world where machines drive the real economy. Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire joins Elad Gil to dive into the future of programmable money and the agentic economy. Jeremy explains why traditional banking fails to support the needs of AI agents, and how stablecoins like USDC facilitate an internet-native economy. They also discuss the tokenization of real-world assets, the move toward full-reserve banking, and Jeremy’s predictions for double-digit GDP growth as AI and blockchain reach their “broadband moment.” Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @jerallaire | @circle Chapters: 00:00 – Cold Open 00:05 – Jeremy Allaire Introduction 00:21 – Origin Story of Circle 02:11 – Rethinking the Financial System 05:26 – The Role of Stablecoins 09:52 – Use Cases for USDC 11:30 – Programmable Money 12:25 – Blockchain as Operating System 14:37 – The Agentic Economy 17:45 – Arc Blockchain Use Cases 27:00 – Scaling Models and Privacy Tech 30:45 – Securitization of Other Assets Under the Blockchain 34:16 – Prediction Markets 35:09 – Incremental Revenue Through GPU Usage 37:19 – Jeremy’s 10 Year Future Vision 41:12 – AI and GDP 44:00 – Conclusion

JAJeremy Allaireguest

Apr 9, 2026·44m·Watch on YouTube ↗

📖 CHAPTERS

1. 1

   Circle’s founding thesis: dollars as an internet protocol

   Jeremy Allaire explains why Circle was started: to create a native “protocol for dollars on the internet.” He frames stablecoins as a commoditized payment layer and highlights the early belief that programmable money would enable autonomous software to participate in economic activity.

2. 2

   Why build on dollars: sound money, full-reserve banking, and crisis lessons

   Allaire contrasts crypto’s early “outside the system” ethos with his view that the dollar will remain a dominant reserve currency for decades. He argues stablecoins align with a full-reserve model that reduces leverage risk exposed by the Great Depression debates and the 2008 financial crisis.

3. 3

   How USDC is backed: treasuries, repos, cash—and legal constraints

   The conversation turns to what actually backs USDC and how regulation shapes its reserve composition. Allaire describes an architecture centered on highly liquid, short-duration U.S. government assets, plus cash for immediate liquidity, with transparency practices around reserves.

4. 4

   USDC in the real world: from microtransactions to institutional settlement

   Allaire outlines the breadth of USDC usage, emphasizing it as a general-purpose architecture. He cites examples ranging from in-game purchases and agent-to-agent payments to large capital markets settlements and enterprise payment flows.

5. 5

   Why stablecoins can be “better money”: 24/7, global access, and programmability

   Sarah and Jeremy enumerate why stablecoins can outperform legacy rails: always-on movement, internet-native interoperability, and access to dollars globally. Allaire stresses the developer experience—stablecoins as a public API—and the strategic role of exporting digital dollars.

6. 6

   Blockchains as operating systems: auditability, integrity, and trust for autonomous systems

   Allaire expands from smart contracts to a broader framing: blockchains as tamper-resistant, auditable operating systems. He argues these properties—verifiability of inputs/outputs and provable state—become even more important as AI systems take autonomous actions in the economy.

7. 7

   The agentic economy: why AI agents need a new financial substrate

   Allaire predicts rapid growth of agent-driven work and agent-to-agent commerce. He argues current financial infrastructure can’t support global, programmable, high-volume microtransactions among autonomous software entities, motivating blockchain-based rails.

8. 8

   Arc as an ‘economic operating system’: design goals and capabilities

   Allaire introduces Circle’s Arc blockchain as infrastructure purpose-built for real economic activity rather than a parallel “shadow” system. He describes features aimed at enterprise-grade reliability, deterministic finality, and a native unit of account in real dollars rather than a volatile gas token.

9. 9

   Privacy and scaling primitives: ZK proofs, rollups, and compliance-friendly confidentiality

   The discussion broadens to crypto infrastructure advances that matter now: scaling and privacy. Allaire argues research like ZK proofs is becoming production-ready, enabling off-chain compute proofs and privacy features that corporations require while still supporting compliance obligations.

10. 10

    Tokenizing real-world assets: stocks, treasuries, and the financial stack migrating on-chain

    Allaire says securitization/tokenization is already underway across the financial system, from registrars to clearinghouses to exchanges. He points to growth in tokenized money markets and equities and notes regulatory guidance is increasingly clarifying how to do this safely.

11. 11

    Beyond porting existing assets: new utility from on-chain finance and AI packaging

    Allaire argues the real breakthrough won’t be simply “put stocks on-chain,” but unlocking new capabilities that weren’t feasible before. He highlights fractionalization, new borrowing/lending mechanics, and AI-enabled packaging of financial products as likely sources of new utility.

12. 12

    Prediction markets and fast-moving capital: USDC as the liquidity bridge

    Prediction markets are positioned as parallel information infrastructure that overlaps with traditional finance. Allaire notes USDC powers flows into markets like Polymarket, with sophisticated traders moving quickly between derivatives, crypto, and event-driven markets.

13. 13

    Productive proof-of-work: tying GPU inference to crypto incentives

    Allaire expresses interest in proposals that replace wasteful proof-of-work with useful computation, such as AI inference. He frames this as a potentially important new direction that could preserve some monetary properties while making energy use economically productive.

14. 14

    A 10-year view: new institutional forms, agent-human organizations, and GDP uncertainty

    Allaire predicts accelerating AI diffusion but with real-world limiters (bureaucracy, law, risk). He expects a turbulent renegotiation of the social contract and the emergence of new on-chain organizational and governance structures, while noting GDP growth could become both large and less meaningful as a welfare metric.