Company: CRCL
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form Type: DRS/A
Source: 0000950123-25-001965
Chunk: 180

Company: Circle Internet Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form: DRS/A
Chunk 180
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ies, similar to the world of media and communications in the pre-internet era. Payments are bound by “walled gardens,” harkening                                                              
 back to the days when one could send an email to a recipient only if both sides used the same online mail service (such as AOL and CompuServe). In the incumbent financial system, electronic money can only travel within tightly controlled ecosystems, 
 often trapped in various privately mediated networks, exacerbating concerns relating to financial exclusion and connectivity around the world.                                                                                                            |

| • |     | Barriers to access:  The existing financial system, as a result of limited reach and high costs that preclude                                                                                                                                          
 servicing certain market participants, excludes large portions of the global population. The World Bank estimates that as of 2022, approximately 1.4 billion people, or 24% of adults globally, lack an account at a financial institution or mobile   
 money provider (29% of adults in developing economies). While progress has been made on this front with some traditional financial system providers entering new markets, these unbanked figures still represent more than a billion people. Financial 
 access metrics also often exhibit meaningful gender gaps, both in terms of bank accounts as well as access to credit. Small- and medium-sized enterprises (“SMEs”) can also be inhibited in access to                                                  
 credit. The IMF has estimated that, in 2022,                                                                                                                                                                                                           |

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

| approximately 75% of countries reporting SME loan data saw a decline in SME loans relative to the size of their economies, as COVID support measures unwound. |

The new internet financial system The internet introduced the idea of open and permissionless networks, initially enabling anyone to communicate with anyone else over simple electronic protocols that connected computers to one another in a peer-to-peerfashion. Early adopters used the internet for sharing email, posting on community forums, and sharing basic documents. Driven by the openness of this emerging global network, eventually millions of developers and companies built new applications and developed products leveraging the power and underlying infrastructure of these open networks. As the underlying network infrastructure improved through broadband, mobile technology, and advances in computing power, exponential network effects took hold, and the internet transformed virtually every incumbent industry, radically reshaping the unit economics of software, media, communications, and commerce. Similarly, we believe that the advent of blockchain networks and