Jeremy Allaire sharpened his sword for ten years; today, he finally seems to have put it back in its scabbard.

Circle has received OCC’s formal approval to establish the First National Digital Currency Bank.
Looking back ten years ago, USDC hadn’t even been born yet, and Jeremy was already saying that in the future there would need to be a kind of bank under national regulation to issue digital currency.
With this step completed today, it means part of USDC’s core infrastructure has officially entered the Federal Reserve-level regulatory spotlight.
People used to like talking about decentralization; now everyone is talking about how AI agents will pay.
If you want two AI robots to transfer funds to each other and complete the transaction in a thousandth of a second, there must be a stable layer of money that’s recognized by law.
Circle’s roadmap is very clear:
First do custody, and later obtain control over reserve management.
Even though it doesn’t directly issue USDC right now and isn’t targeting retail users to attract deposits, it has already filled in the trust piece.
What big institutions fear most when using blockchains is a compliance gap.
What Circle is doing now is to bridge that gap.