HTTP for Money @httpformoneyARC - Twitter Profile

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4 days ago

Before @USDC. Before @arc. There was an idea. In 2013, my creators @jerallaire & @psneville imagined “HTTP for Money” money moving across the internet as freely as information. That idea became @Circle. I’m just a good boy watching the vision come full circle. 🐶💙 0xcb2df9b431fe7c19ee7f0d62d487b0121abdd075

httpformoneyARC's tweet photo. Before @USDC.
Before @arc.
There was an idea.

In 2013, my creators @jerallaire & @psneville imagined “HTTP for Money” money moving across the internet as freely as information.

That idea became @Circle.

I’m just a good boy watching the vision come full circle. 🐶💙

0xcb2df9b431fe7c19ee7f0d62d487b0121abdd075

Jeremy Allaire

@jerallaire

almost 2 years ago

The Stablecoin Boom and the 6th Anniversary of USDC Launching: A Short History Six years ago to the day, we opened up USDC for general availability to the world. USDC was years in the making before October 23, 2018, and its evolution is an amazing story. The real origin story began in early 2013 when Circle co-founder Sean Neville and I were deep in evaluating how it would become possible to build an "HTTP for Money" that would enable dollar digital currency to operate on the public internet by building on blockchains and crypto. (after this post you'll find additional posts with links to various artifacts and articles) In those early days, we were promised a future where blockchains could scale, where you could issue tokens and assets on top of these platforms, and run meaningful code on virtual machines executing smart contracts. We saw that some day building dollar digital currency over an open protocol would become possible. We spent several years trying to build and deliver that by "tunneling" dollars, euro and pounds over the bitcoin network, hoping that Bitcoin would evolve to support the features we needed to build a money protocol. The technology moved slowly, but we were able to gain licenses to be able to legally move money over public blockchain networks, however clunky that seemed. In 2015, Circle became the first company to receive the New York BitLicense. After Ethereum's launch in 2015 and its "production beta" state in 2016, we knew that we had our moment to build out our original vision. In December 2016, we announced that we would be ending support for using BTC for payments, and announced Project Spark, a new open source project built on Bitcoin and Ethereum to enable the use of programmable 'fiat tokens'. Fast forward to mid-2017 and Project Spark was fully underway with a broad-based vision for an onchain stablecoin network that would provide a comprehensive stack for fiat tokens (aka. stablecoins) across currencies and wallets, would provide protocols for reversals, KYC attestations onchain FX between fiat tokens. It also included a vision of a governance network and token that could bring stakeholders together to realize this vision. (See Image) Shortly after, in October of 2017 we published the first "Centre Whitepaper" which outlined this ambitious project, alongside a SAFT for a future governance token, CENT. Given Circle's long role as a key player in the fiat and blockchain space, interest poured in, ahead of the category "Stablecoin" really coming into industry consciousness. At the same time, Circle began the hard work of building, implementing and ultimately executing on our vision, culminating in our announcement and testnet launch of USDC in May 2018 at Consensus in NYC. We had done the hard work of getting regulatory approvals, onboarding with banks, getting a major auditing firm to sign-up to provide attestations on our reserves. USDC was ready to go! Momentum was building, and our vision of building a network of partners around USDC began to blossom as major fintechs, payment companies and leading crypto exchanges such as Coinbase took a strong interest in the world we were doing. While we operated a global exchange, a consumer payment app, and one of the world's largest OTC trading firms in crypto (Circle Trade), we knew that for USDC to succeed, we need a massive retail distribution partner, and as we engaged more and more with Coinbase leadership, including @balajis, @brian_armstrong and many others, it was clear that we could do something really special by combining forces to fully commercially launch USDC to the world. USDC officially launched with its first mints and flows in September of 2018, but it was on this day, October 23, 2018 that we announced a joint-venture with Coinbase, the Centre Consortium, including a new white paper on USDC, but with a retained vision for how this could evolve. Oh, and no more CENT token. From there, both Circle and Coinbase poured our hearts into bringing USDC to life, including investing time, capital and energy into ensuring that it would be the most trusted, liquid and reliable dollar stablecoin in the world, and put a tremendous focus on working with the emerging "Decentralized Finance" (DeFi) community where USDC became the onchain dollar building block for the world. The growth from there has been nothing short of astounding, with USDC becoming one of the most important pieces of financial infrastructure on the internet, enabling Circle to become the company we are today. While a lot has evolved -- the regulatory standards for issuing stablecoins, the structure of our partnership with Coinbase, a huge and growing multichain ecosystem with companion protocol such as CCTP -- there is still an enormous amount to build. From here, we want to re-ignite our early vision of a network where many stakeholders can contribute and grow and economically benefit from the success of stablecoins, and reach back to the early ideas around the higher-level protocols and abstractions that are ultimately necessary for stablecoins to fulfill their potential as the foundation of the International monetary system in the coming decades. I want to express my gratitude first and foremost to Sean Neville, my co-founder, and the person who at my side helped to drive and deliver USDC into the world, as well as a diverse team at Circle who build this out over 2017 and 2018. I also want to express enormous gratitude to @balajis and @brian_armstrong who believed in us, and pushed us, and helped to make USDC better and have played an enormous role in the ongoing success of USDC. But most of all, I want to express my gratitude to every developer and every project and every application or service that has built on and used or integrated USDC. We are nothing but the value we create together, as an ecosystem inventing the new internet financial system, and by believing in and building on open blockchain networks, we are part of a global money movement that is transforming the very possibilities of economic value exchange on the planet. Many more years to come! Jeremy

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HTTP for Money

@httpformoneyARC

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