Company: CRCL
Filing Date: 2025-08-12
Form Type: S-1
Source: 0001193125-25-178989
Chunk: 187

Company: Circle Internet Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-08-12
Form: S-1
Chunk 187
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 expenses, these slow processes can create loss potential and result in significant capital being locked up for days awaiting settlement (e.g., margin posted to securities clearinghouses that settle T+1). Commercial transactions are plagued by delayed financial settlement and high costs, reflecting a lucrative source of revenue for payment processors but consequently representing a real cost to the global economy that could otherwise be put to more productive use. Inefficiencies in the incumbent financial system also encourage counterparties to use high-friction financial instruments, such as bank guarantees or letters of credit, which perpetuate the inefficiencies inherent in the system. |

| • |     | Walled gardens: Today’s systems of electronic money are constructed around national and corporate boundaries, often regulated and operated by national monopolies, 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, 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-peer fashion. Early adopters used the internet for sharing email, posting on community forums, and sharing basic