Circle CEO Says Reports on Visa, Mastercard Stablecoin Alliance Shouldn’t Be Taken at Face Value

Circle Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Allaire brushed aside concerns over recent reports that Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase are forming their own stablecoin platform alliance, telling investors not to take the reports at face value.

At a Circle investor meeting on June 4, Allaire said the company already has a deep partnership with Coinbase centered on the USDC stablecoin. Circle also maintains strong relationships with major global payments companies including Visa, Mastercard and Stripe, he said.

He pointed to what he described as concrete results. Stablecoin transactions on Stripe and a substantial portion of Visa’s payment settlement activity are already being processed with USDC. “Stablecoins are not a business that can succeed simply by printing new money,” Allaire said. Several large companies have already tried issuing their own stablecoins, he added, but have struggled to build meaningful transaction volume and networks.

Most of the roughly $22 trillion in on-chain transactions is already based on USDC, according to Allaire. By contrast, newer stablecoins have yet to reach meaningful transaction volume.

Allaire also laid out Circle’s vision for its new Layer 1 blockchain, Arc. “Arc is an operating system for the internet economy,” he said. “It will handle everything on a single infrastructure, from the movement of money and asset tokenization to real-world assets and payments between AI agents.”