Circle is telling a bigger story CRCL Yesterday, Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, did an AMA with a lot of information. Let me help you break down the key points. 1. The narrative has been upgraded The label of Circle used to be the issuer of USDC, but now it will become an Internet financial operating system (with a strong currency circle flavor )。 The key carriers of this transformation are three things: USDC network, Arc economic operating system, and on chain payment network. Arc is the highlight. Defined as an economic operating system, it not only involves the flow of money, but also includes asset tokenization, machine execution of economic contracts, and collaborative settlement between AI agents. The fully diluted valuation of the token pre-sale is $3 billion, which indicates that the market is paying for Circle's platform story. 2. The real reason for the slowdown in growth The growth of USDC has indeed slowed down in 2026. It's not Circle, it's money moving. Speculative capital has flowed from encrypted assets to AI infrastructure. You can understand from the data that Bitcoin chips are flowing towards Nvidia. This macro rotation has an impact on the entire stablecoin market, not just USDC. On the other hand, the actual usage data of USDC is on the rise. The trading volume has reached a new high, and mainstream apps such as Meta and Cash App are still being integrated. Allaire put it bluntly: "What we are looking at is institutional attractiveness, international transaction attractiveness, and usage scenario attractiveness. It is normal for circulation to have cycles 3. What is a moat The market is most concerned about giants such as Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe developing their own stablecoins. The core of Allaire's response is one sentence: stablecoins are network effect businesses, and history has repeatedly proven that consortium stablecoins have not been successful. The moat of Circle has four layers: -Liquidity: Q1 Casting Redemption Nearly $150 Billion -Distribution: Covering 185 countries -Interoperability: CCTP Cross Chain Protocol -Regulatory Compliance: Recognized by Major Central Banks Worldwide These four layers are stacked together to form a network effect. The integration of the Cash App into USDC is equivalent to adding 60 million active user nodes to this network. Meta chooses USDC and adds another layer. Every connected application is strengthening this network. 4. AI agents are the next growth point Allaire positions AI proxy payment as the core scenario of Arc. He proposed a concept: the paradigm shift of Agent as a Service from SaaS to AaaS. Each agent is a specialized economic participant who can sell services based on consumption volume. He believes that the transaction volume executed by agents will far exceed that of traditional applications. Circle's Agent Stack and X402 protocol have been promoted in the developer community, and there have indeed been several waves of AI hype on the BASE chain 5. How should we view it The core message of this AMA is: Don't use the framework of a reserve income company to understand Circle. USDC is already a free public payment system that processes trillions of dollars, and Circle has added an operating system, payment network, and AI native capabilities on top of it. Each layer has a monetization logic. Allaire finally said something worth pondering: when the market is pricing with short-term noise, the real question is whether Circle can win the larger award of Internet economic coordination layer. Circle's strategic direction is clear and execution is also advancing. If you believe that stablecoins will become the infrastructure of the digital economy, then Circle's story is just beginning.