Company: CRCL
Filing Date: 2025-08-04
Form Type: DRS
Source: 0000950123-25-006942
Chunk: 189

Company: Circle Internet Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-08-04
Form: DRS
Chunk 189
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 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 the internet possible, including issuing digital financial
assets, efficiently exchanging and processing transactions involving these assets, and writing code that can intermediate more complex transactions. Importantly, these blockchain networks can operate openly on the internet, reducing society’s
dependence on centralized intermediaries while unlocking efficiencies. We believe that blockchains could serve as a robust foundation for the creation of a new financial system built from the ground up on the internet—what we callthe new internet financial system.

This new internet financial system has the potential to substantially reduce inefficiencies in today’s financial system. Given the amount of value being exchanged in today’s financial system, the benefits of increased

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

efficiency are vast. Trillions of dollars in payments and cross-border remittances occur annually, often at high costs due to the complex (often multi-party) legacy rails on which they flow. Vast
sums of capital are trapped in multi-day settlement in capital markets, rather than deployed to productive uses. Immense operational, counterparty, and liquidity risks exist due to the opacity of financial exposures, outdated, manual workflows, and
a dependence on cash held in fractional reserve banks. The internet financial system has the potential to address these inefficiencies by reducing cost and latency, enhancing transparency, and using safer underlying collateral.

The new internet financial system enables significantly increased money velocity. While the potential efficiency benefits of the internet financial
system are staggering, we believe these are just a subset of the potential benefits it brings. As the marginal cost of storing and moving value approaches zero, conditions are ripe for the volume of value exchange to increase exponentially, similar
to how the volume of information exchange exploded as the marginal cost of moving data on the internet approached zero. In such a future, we expect that both the velocity and versatility of money will increase dramatically, as people and businesses
are able to transact more freely and frictionlessly.

The new internet financial system opens up new opportunities and use cases in finance and commerce through the advent of smart contracts running on blockchains. We believe programmability of money and digital assets represents a major inflection point in the utility of money. Economic arrangements can be literally codified,