Company: CRCL
Filing Date: 2025-08-04
Form Type: DRS
Source: 0000950123-25-006942
Chunk: 9

Company: Circle Internet Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-08-04
Form: DRS
Chunk 9
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 system and to protect against abuse by bad actors. Although the infrastructure system enabling this
movement of money is critical to the functioning of the existing financial system and powers one of the largest sectors in the global economy, the technology underpinning this system in large part dates from the 1970s and 1980s.

Today’s financial system has brought countless benefits, yet inefficiencies remain stubbornly high.The financial system has enabled massive
societal advances, lifting billions of people out of extreme poverty and contributing to enormous economic growth. Technological advancements have enabled innovations such as credit cards, electronic payments, and electronic capital markets. Yet
despite this history of progress, and despite intense competition, end-user costs and systemic inefficiencies persist. Modern FinTech firms have generally focused on modernizing front-end interfaces but still often rely on legacy infrastructure,
limiting true innovation. We believe the next innovation in the exchange of value, which is our core focus at Circle, will drive an evolution in the underlying infrastructure of the financial system that meets critical market demand.

The internet revolutionized the transmission of data, bringing exponential growth and previously unimagined innovation to countless sectors. Likewise, the internet has the potential to transform today’s financial system. The advent of the internet enabled “all-to-all” communication at vastly lower costs by advancing communication from tightly controlled analog rails (e.g., radio,
telephone, cable) to standardized network protocols. These protocols enabled new infrastructure for the movement of data and information. While adoption took time, and early use cases initially both struggled to scale and encountered meaningful
scrutiny, over time, more innovators and developers began building on the internet and more users connected to the network via the applications they built. The end result: the cost of communication has approached zero at point of use, the volume of
communication has exploded, and previously unimaginable services have now emerged. Today, the leaders of the modern digital economy are built on internet rails, and more of the economy is transitioning to these rails each day.

Blockchain networks enable the creation of the internet financial system.Blockchains provide a new base layer of internet infrastructure that uses
advancements in cryptography and distributed computing to enable secure data exchange, transaction processing, and computation. These advancements make new categories of applications on

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CONFIDENTIAL TREATMENT REQUESTED BY CIRCLE INTERNET GROUP, INC. PURSUANT TO 17 C.F.R. § 200.83

the internet possible, including issuing digital financial assets, efficiently exchanging and processing transactions involving