The latest crypto firm to hold its own AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) session on Reddit is Goldman Sachs-backed Circle. The CEO and other members of the peer-to-peer payments company took questions from the community earlier today.
Whilst largely a PR piece for the firm to lament its successes of 2018, some interesting developments at Circle were hinted at during the session. CEO, Jeremy Allaire, also stated that he fully expects crypto to have a greater impact on the humanity than the invention of the internet.
Circle: Bullish on the Future of Crypto and Bitcoin’s Continued Global Rise in Importance
The AMA session began with an introduction in which the Circle representatives taking part stated the firm’s 2018 achievements. It first acknowledged the launch of Circle Invest – a platform aimed at making investing in digital assets as easy as possible for inexperienced users. It then mentioned the CENTRE Consortium and its launch of the USDC stablecoin, which in its short existence has already received a full audit and hit a market capitalisation of almost $3.5 million. Finally, it touched upon the firm’s intention to acquire SeedInvest, a crowd funding platform for pre-vetted startups.
After discussion about its newest product launches, the Circle AMA introduction went on to talk about the successes its existing interests had enjoyed during 2018. It stated that the OTC wing of the company, Circle Trade, had already executed over 10,000 trades worth more than $24 billion. Finally, Circle Pay and Circle Research were also acknowledged.
Following the introductions, the cryptocurrency community were invited to ask questions to the team of representatives present. Amongst these were the company’s co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire.
When asked about the Circle’s “central mission”, Allaire responded at length. The CEO stated that the firm wanted to connect every person to an open financial system and that value will one day flow as freely as does information today.
Allaire then touched upon what drew him to crypto originally. He stated that he had been interested in decentralised systems since the 1990s and was fascinated by their power to democratise society. This was followed by the CEO’s vision for cryptocurrency in the future:
“In my view, crypto is a much more significant and disruptive innovation than the Web, and its impact on society, politics, economics, governance will be far far greater for humanity over time.”
One Reddit user known as “beeef21” asked what the firm was doing to educate global regulators. Allaire responded that Circle was investing “an enormous amount” to increase crypto knowledge amongst regulators and has done since 2013:
“In general, regulators are keen to learn, and we spend a lot of our time trying to get them to understand the benefits of crypto, how it actually works, etc.”
The CEO went on to address what he considers to be the largest regulatory hurdle for a firm like Circle – the lack of direct guidance on how regulators like the SEC classify digital assets. According to Allaire, greater regulatory clarification could “unlock a lot of market activity.”
Perhaps the most interesting question for those wondering whether there is room in crypto for multiple different coins was posted by user “jjrolls”. They asked if the Circle staff thought crypto would be more used as a store of value or a medium of exchange in 10 years time.
Again, Allaire fielded this question. The CEO stated that Circle expects there to be “millions of different crypto assets” and those that serve different use cases would be able to thrive alongside those tailored for alternate purposes:
“… the short-answer is that we thing [sic.] SOV [store-of-value] assets like Bitcoin will become much much larger and more broadly adopted, and that other crypto assets will be used in an incredibly broad array of everyday transactions.”
Other notable topics touched upon during the AMA session including the regulatory environment surrounding privacy coins such as Monero, the return of the Poloniex “Troll Box”, and plans to allow users to buy USDC using traditional payment methods such as credit cards.
Related Reading: Circle’s CEO Allaire: Every World Currency Will Soon Have a Digital Version
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