Most Influential: Jeremy Allaire

Circle (CRCL) Co-founder, Chairman and CEO Jeremy Allaire spent 2025 turning a long-running thesis — that dollar-backed digital money would become core financial infrastructure — into a mainstream policy and technology agenda.

This feature is a part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025 list.

Allaire appears proud of the strong regulatory foundation of his firm's fiat-backed stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC), which is the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization. During a Feb. 25 interview with Bloomberg, in a thinly-veiled attack on rival Tether's stablecoin USDT$0.9995, he said: "It shouldn’t be a free pass, right? Where you can just ignore the U.S. law and go do whatever the hell you want wherever and sell into the United States.”

"This is about consumer protection and financial integrity,” Allaire went on to add. “Whether you’re an offshore company or based in Hong Kong, if you want to offer your dollar stablecoin in the U.S., you should need to register in the U.S. just like we have to go register everywhere else."

Allaire's advocacy in Washington helped build momentum behind the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, or the GENIUS Act, the first federal law to establish licensing and reserve standards for payment stablecoins, which passed the U.S. Senate on June 17 and the House on July 17 before being signed into law by President Trump on July 18.

On June 30, in a Circle press relase announcing the firm's submission of an application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national trust bank, First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A., Allaire said, "Establishing a national digital currency trust bank of this kind marks a significant milestone in our goal to build an internet financial system that is transparent, efficient and accessible."

In the fall, Allaire’s strategic focus shifted to Arc, the institutional blockchain Circle unveiled as a foundation for regulated, dollar-denominated financial activity.

In late October, while speaking with CNBC’s Sara Eisen at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, he described Arc as “an economic OS for the internet,” built for payments, foreign exchange, lending and capital-markets workflows with sub-second settlement, privacy controls and predictable dollar-priced fees.

He said demand for USDC in emerging markets was “very significant,” singling out the Middle East, and noted that more than 100 companies across banking, payments, technology and AI were testing Arc’s Oct. 28 public testnet ahead of a planned 2026 mainnet launch.

Allaire closed the year by widening the frame even further.

In a Dec. 4 conversation with WIRED's Steven Levy, he called blockchain networks “economic OS paradigms” and said the shift to programmable financial systems would be “a huge part of what unfolds for the internet over the next five to 10 years.”

His 2025 influence rested on more than products or policy wins. It came from articulating a coherent vision for digital dollars, embracing federal oversight and pushing an institutional blockchain agenda — making him one of the central figures shaping how programmable finance will operate in the years ahead.