JA: Sure. I think in different areas, quite possibly. I think it’s unknown exactly how these centralized platforms will adapt to this.
There are certainly, I think, people who believe that it’ll be possible to have decentralized e-commerce marketplaces or decentralized social communications platforms or decentralized transportation logistics systems—many things like that. And, conceptually, you could see how those are possible.
I think the technology today, public blockchains and the associated infrastructure, is not even close to being able to deliver the kind of quality of user experience and quality of service that you would expect from what you currently have with centralized services. But you could imagine how the infrastructure would get there over a five-to-10-year period, in which case you really could see some of those business models fundamentally challenged with a decentralized model.
So, that will be interesting to watch, whether those companies embrace that, or how they embrace that.
X: How might quantum computing affect what you’re trying to do?
JA: A lot of the infrastructure—things like Ethereum, which is a kind of crypto-computing platform—is relying on cryptographic proofs as a way to run a decentralized computer. But I think cryptography is one of these things where if there’s advancements, they can be applied in both directions.
X: What do you mean by that?
JA: You can apply the crypto to make things more secure, or you can apply the crypto to break things that are less secure. That’s sort of the essence of it, right? It’s who’s got the better math at any given time, fundamentally. For a while, the NSA, one could say, had better math and could use that better math to break crypto that existed—weak crypto that existed in different places.
With quantum, the concern is, is there a step function that happens, and it happens secretly in the hands of bad actors or foreign powers that want to hurt us. And then, all of a sudden, everything is chaos because essentially all security and a lot of infrastructure has just been made completely transparent and, basically, it’s sort of game over.
I think you could say quantum crypto is almost like a military-grade technology, and there’s a lot of, let’s just say, monitoring of the firms involved in it and the technology involved in it. It’s very tightly guarded [intellectual property]. I think the crypto community is obviously paying extremely close attention to it because if there are new algorithms that become possible, new encryption models with quantum, you want to be able to use those as soon as they’re available so that things don’t break.
X: What’s Circle’s ultimate vision?
JA: We want to both provide the kind of fundamental market infrastructure that is needed to realize the possibilities of this global digital economy built on crypto, and we want to build the delightful consumer products that touch potentially hundreds of millions or billions of people over time that utilize that infrastructure.
We don’t think of ourselves as a retail bank. But we do want to provide services that have to do with storing value, exchanging value, investing value, borrowing value, and things like that.
X: Will the concept of a bank just not exist in 20 years?
JA: I’m sure there’ll be a concept of a bank in 20 years. The interesting question I like to ask is, who’s the largest communications company in the world right now?
X: I would argue Google or Facebook.
JA: Tencent is the largest communications company in the world. The amount of communication that happens using their platform is far greater than what happens on Facebook’s platforms; it’s bigger than what happens on AT&T’s platforms. But no one would think of [Tencent] as a communications company. They make money selling games.
Would you say, is Google the largest advertising and media company in the world? Probably not. People think of Google as a technology company.
So, I think the categories morph. And in 10 years or in 15 years, a company like Circle, if we’re still around, probably you won’t think of us as a bank. But we might do a lot of things that you might think of as services that a bank might provide. And we might actually have government licenses that have to do with that as well because we’re required to by law. But from a consumer perspective and from how people would actually see us, we want to be an Internet technology company.
