Company: CRCL
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form Type: DRS/A
Source: 0000950123-25-001965
Chunk: 16

Company: Circle Internet Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form: DRS/A
Chunk 16
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 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 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 Immense operational, counterparty, and liquidity risks exist due to the opacity of financial exposures, outdated, manual workflows, and a dependence on cash held in fractional reserve banks.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, executed, and enforced entirely online, enabling people and
firms across the world to safely enter into internet-based financial and commercial arrangements, while reducing the need for third-party intermediaries. And, just as the Web and App Stores led to an explosion in innovative information services, the
growth of smart contracts and blockchain-based applications could significantly accelerate innovation in financial services.

The new internet financial system has the potential to increase economic inclusion among underserved populations. The existing financial system’s inefficiencies result in the exclusion of certain segments of the global population, particularly those who are poorer,
less educated, and