Q art. Is, uh, I think the old expression. So let's, let's talk about your journey with Circle. Uh, stablecoins obviously are top of mind because we had the Genius Act. Uh, my bestie, uh, David Sachs, who's our crypto and AI czar for America, who's here with me at Davos, uh, or I should say I'm here with him. Uh, he invited me to come. This technology is important. Why?
A I mean, look, um, when I got started working on this almost 13 years ago, Um, Bitcoin had emerged, um, and, uh, it was from my perspective as an internet technologist, I was thinking about, wow, this seems like a new infrastructure layer for the internet, like a missing infrastructure layer of the internet. The internet had ways to represent in, you know, data, media, audio, video, uh, you know, software, but there was no notion of money on the internet, and there was no protocol for money on the internet. And it was very clear at the time that that was going to happen. And when, when we started, um, I wasn't convinced that everyone in the world is just going to use like a new, uh, a new, you know, commodity money like Bitcoin. Um, my view is that we needed a bridge. We needed to connect kind of the existing fiat system to crypto and to these new networks and, um, and build like, uh, uh, what we called like an HTTP for dollars on the internet. And that was the idea. And eventually that's called stablecoins. Early on, we talked about we're building fiat digital currency or fiat tokens or all this, but stablecoins stuck. Um, but I mean, the basic idea is we now have a general purpose, general architecture form of money on the internet, digital dollars that can move just like everything else, but that, and, and can, you know, transact peer to peer Uh, which is super, super powerfu…
AI assessment note: “we now have a general purpose, general architecture form of money on the internet”