MW This billionaire CEO says stablecoins will matter to you - even if you don't own crypto
By Frances Yue
Circle Internet Group's Jeremy Allaire lands on the MarketWatch 25 list of people who are reshaping how we live, work, spend, save and invest
Jeremy Allaire's Circle Internet Group went public in a blockbuster IPO earlier this year.
For years, Jeremy Allaire has bet that stablecoins will play a major role in our financial future. In 2025, that wager made Allaire look smart.
His company, Circle Internet Group (CRCL), listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a blockbuster initial public offering in June, and the company's market capitalization recently stood at $26.5 billion. Its main product is a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin called USDC (USDCUSD) - a digital currency with its value pegged 1:1 to the dollar. USDC is now the second-largest stablecoin in the world by market capitalization and the largest issued by a U.S. crypto player.
Allaire also attended a White House ceremony in July where he watched President Donald Trump sign the Genius Act, a law Allaire had pushed for that will regulate stablecoins in a way that supporters argue could pave the way for their widespread use.
To Allaire, these developments are just one sign that we're getting closer to a revolution in the way we spend and save money. He envisions a future where money moves as seamlessly between people on the internet as information and data, and where near-zero-cost transactions grow exponentially. Allaire believes that stablecoins, as opposed to bitcoin, will integrate cryptocurrencies into the traditional financial system.
"The web was about the exchange of information," Allaire said. "This is about the exchange of value. This is about transforming the way the economic system works."
It's not uncommon to see crypto boosters promise that digital assets will transform finance. But Allaire argues that what sets his company apart is that it's not just focused on a speculative asset. Instead, Circle is working to transform the internet's relationship with finance through digital assets that are backed by traditional currencies, which Allaire wants to be regulated in many jurisdictions to help fuel transactions around the world. Even as skeptics have raised concerns about potential risks to consumers posed by more widespread adoption of stablecoins, Allaire has tried to allay regulators' worries and integrate the product into mainstream finance. He lands on the MarketWatch 25 list of people who are reshaping how we live, work, spend, save and invest.
There's a "collision of the internet with the financial system, and it's literally happening in front of us as we speak," Allaire told MarketWatch in a recent interview at Circle's headquarters, located in a building that overlooks lower Manhattan's historic financial district. Ultimately, changes stemming from the growth of crypto could have a more significant impact on society than the internet, Allaire said.
Allaire added that improvements in stablecoin technology and more widespread adoption over the past year helped to convince U.S. lawmakers to pass the Genius Act.
Circle is already a big business. It generated $2 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2025, a securities filing shows. Circle's USDC stablecoin has seen its market capitalization rise to a recent $75 billion as of Friday, up from $253 million at the end of 2018, the year the coin was launched, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Meanwhile, the overall market capitalization of stablecoins has climbed to a recent $315 billion from below $1 billion in 2019. While USDC's main rival, tether (USDTUSD), still dominates the global market with a 58.5% share, USDC has been growing rapidly, taking up about 24% of the stablecoin space.
Policy makers now know that "the technology is here to stay, and it's going to be transformative," Allaire said. "It's not going away, and so they're staring it in the face and have to deal with it."
More than a decade of convincing skeptics
Through countless conversations and meetings over more than a decade, Allaire worked to counter skepticism from politicians, regulators, investors and potential users about digital currencies and stablecoins. Allaire first testified at a Senate committee hearing in 2013, the year he founded Circle.
He was constantly met with concern about the lack of transparency surrounding stablecoins and questions of whether they were fully backed by secure assets. Regulators have also worried that consumers could be misled about the safety of stablecoins and that they could be used to facilitate money laundering and other criminal activity.
But Allaire kept on meeting with lawmakers and regulators, trying to convince them that stablecoins are a major innovation and that Circle would like to play by the rules. He also got out his company's checkbook.
For the 2024 election cycle alone, which included 2023 and 2024, Circle spent $290,000 lobbying lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and made more than $1 million in political donations aimed at pushing forward stablecoin regulations, according to data from OpenSecrets.
Allaire's years-long focus on gaining regulatory clarity was crucial to the Genius Act becoming law, said Heath Tarbert, former chair of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who was hired by Allaire in 2023 to serve as Circle's chief legal officer and who later became the company's president. The law passed with bipartisan backing.
"Jeremy was there early and first talking about the [blockchain] technology and its ability to be transformative to the financial system," Tarbert told MarketWatch. "He took that vision to Washington and started explaining it, I think before virtually anyone else in the industry did."
Supporters of the Genius Act, including Allaire, argue that the law establishes a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins. It will enhance consumer protection and ensure financial stability, they say, by allowing only permitted issuers to issue stablecoins backed on at least a 1:1 basis by qualifying high-quality liquid assets. Furthermore, by increasing adoption, it could strengthen the U.S. dollar's reserve status, they say.
But critics argue that the law could, instead, cause trouble for consumers. The critics say that while regulatory certainty will help stablecoin businesses operate, the regulation itself won't sufficiently protect consumers when problems occur.
"With Genius, you're essentially creating a bank-lite, not a bank-like, regulatory approach that offers some modicum of protection but actually could amplify the risks," said Mark Hays, associate director of cryptocurrency and financial technology at Americans for Financial Reform, a Washington-based advocacy group.
Hays pointed to USDC's brief depegging from the U.S. dollar in March 2023. Depegging refers to a situation when stablecoins trade below or above their intended fixed value. After Circle said that $3.3 billion of its $40 billion of USDC reserves were held in uninsured deposits at the failing Silicon Valley Bank, the crypto's value briefly fell to $0.87 before coming back to its 1:1 peg.
"If the government had not stepped in that weekend, it would have created another mini-crash for the crypto industry," Hays said. "So if stablecoins are supposed to be safer than banks, then how come the single 'safest' stablecoin required a Fed bailout, just like the banks did in the 2008 financial crisis?"
A Circle spokesperson said in emailed comments to MarketWatch that the company has "always managed USDC to be fully backed by underlying fiat reserves, redeemable one-for-one. We've built the deepest banking and reserving infrastructure while also advocating for regulatory clarity for stablecoins, which still did not exist in 2023." The majority of the USDC reserve is now invested in the Circle Reserve Fund, a government money-market fund custodied at the Bank of New York Mellon $(BK)$ and managed by BlackRock $(BLK)$, according to regulatory filings.
Allaire and the early internet
Allaire's relationship with technology began while he was growing up in Winona, Minn. In the 1980s, he and his brother, Joseph "J.J." Allaire, were among the rare kids to have an Apple II computer at home. The interface was text-based and cumbersome, but the brothers loved experimenting, writing simple programs and using spreadsheets to track side projects like a sports-card-trading business.
Later on, at Macalester College, where he majored in political science and philosophy, Allaire gained access to the college's computer network from his dorm room because his roommate had a work-study job as a system administrator.
Like many college kids, Allaire became interested in the work of Noam Chomsky, an American scholar known for his work in linguistics, political activism and social criticism. What particularly interested him was that Chomsky was one of the few intellectuals who viewed systems of power from a historical lens, with detailed facts to back up his views. Chomsky also advocated so-called anarcho-syndicalism, a political and economic philosophy that envisions decentralized, participatory organizations and that still echoes with what crypto promises to bring, Allaire said.
Allaire reached out to Chomsky in 1994 to ask whether he'd be interested in moving his work online. It was a radical move. Back then, most scholarly work was exclusively found in books or behind the paywalls of journals. But Chomsky said yes. Allaire flew to Boston, where he visited Chomsky and his wife at their home. While there, he copied content from a proprietary MIT system onto discs. He then spent a long time building a website to make Chomsky's work available online.
Allaire would go on to found companies like the Allaire Corporation, which focused on how to build interactive software on the internet, and Brightcove, which became a publicly listed online video platform.
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November 14, 2025 09:25 ET (14:25 GMT)
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