Company: CRCL
Filing Date: 2025-08-12
Form Type: S-1
Source: 0001193125-25-178989
Chunk: 180

Company: Circle Internet Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-08-12
Form: S-1
Chunk 180
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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 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**