Company: CRCL
Filing Date: 2025-04-18
Form Type: S-1/A
Source: 0001193125-25-084832
Chunk: 6

Company: Circle Internet Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-04-18
Form: S-1/A
Chunk 6
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 and traded together would lead to a world of greater political and economic stability. It was during that time, in 1990, that I got hooked on the internet—the pre-commercial version of
command-lines, weird message boards, and disparate servers filled with random scientific and government data.

It was in those moments that I became an internet
maximalist. It was as clear as day to me that open global computer networks, connected through open technology protocols that anyone could build on and use, would lead to a wholesale transformation of society and the economy.

I spent the next 20 years committing myself to building out internet software platforms and infrastructure that helped to realize those ideas. I ultimately co-founded and helped to lead and take public two global internet technology firms through the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras, when the open internet transformed software, media, communications, and retail commerce in
irreversible and ultimately unpredictable ways.

The great financial crisis—an inflection point

Also nearly 20 years into my journey as an internet maximalist, the world went through this century’s most significant global financial crisis. The 1990s and 2000s
had represented a period of dramatic economic growth and globalization, and the internet had surely played no small part in fostering that economic velocity. But it all came crashing down in 2008.

As a student of political economy, I needed to understand what happened. This huge part of the global economic system—the financial services industry—had
failed us massively. As I dug into the history of banking, money, central banking, and the international monetary system, I became convinced that we needed a new architecture for the financial system, one that was rooted in the internet—built
on open networks, open software, and global integration—and eventually one where full-reserve digital currency can be intermediated with internet-based credit markets to create what could ultimately become a safer financial system.

It was during this time of personal exploration that I stumbled across Bitcoin in 2012. While I was not sold on the idea that Bitcoin itself would become the answer,
within it I found a revolutionary combination of technical innovation and philosophical alignment around the idea of an open, internet-based alternative financial system.

Circle’s founding and vision

In early 2013, after immersing in the
early technical communities that had formed around Bitcoin and blockchains, it became extremely clear to me and Circle co-founder Sean Neville that a major new layer of the

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internet was being born, one that provided