Interview: Dante A. Disparte, CSO, Circle

“A CBDC in Europe is like trying to compete with internet by designing an intranet” 

This company distributes one of the largest market capitalizations in crypto, yet its assets remain stable in value. Founded in 2013 by Jeremy Allaire, Circle issues USDC, a cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar and fully backed by it, to millions of users worldwide. A growth that has been significantly supported by longtime strategic partner Coinbase, which has acquired an equity interest in Circle.

As of March 2025, when these lines were written, USDC holds nearly one-third of the market share, with a capitalization of $57 billion, trailing only the pioneer stablecoin, Tether’s USDT ($142 billion). Beyond the U.S. dollar, Circle also tokenizes the euro (EURC), though the European digital currency accounts for less than 1% of its business. With licenses in most U.S. states, an e-money license covering the entire European Union under the new MiCA regime, and regulatory recognition in Dubai, Singapore, Japan, and Canada, Circle aims to distribute tokenized versions of fiat currencies globally. The company is also on track to become publicly listed one day, which would make it the first stablecoin issuer to achieve this milestone—a significant step for one of the longest-standing crypto companies in operation.

One man who can attest to this journey is Dante Alighieri Disparte. Whether in traditional finance or the emerging digital asset space, his name is widely recognized. His silhouette is easily identifiable, as he is rarely seen without a checkered suit. It is said that his home library is particularly well-stocked, something one could easily infer from his eloquence and love for words. Our first encounter in 2024 was at the French Ministry of Finance in Paris—not exactly a venue known for comedy shows. Yet, he managed to make a room full of institutional attendees laugh about a typically dry topic: fiat currency. Not entirely surprising, given that his first name pays tribute to the author of The Divine Comedy, an exquisite commentary on the state of the Church in 14th-century Italy.

Now a key figure at Circle, Disparte has served as Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy since 2021. Before joining Circle, he was already active in the cryptocurrency industry, holding an executive role at the now-defunct Diem, formerly Libra (not to be confused with the memecoin promoted by Argentinian President Javier Milei). Libra was originally a digital asset initiative by Meta (formerly Facebook) but was ultimately scrapped due to regulatory pressures. Despite being the founder and chairman of the insurance brokerage firm Risk Cooperative, the Puerto Rico native can hardly be described as risk-averse.

Driven by the potential of digital assets, Disparte has played a pivotal role in establishing Circle’s credibility with regulators worldwide. In this interview with CoinShares, he shares his views on the rapidly evolving stablecoin ecosystem—one that CoinShares analyst Matthew Kimmell recently described as “a growing force in global finance.”

This interview has been edited for clarity.

CoinShares: Why did you choose to continue in the cryptocurrency sector with Circle after Diem/Libra’s shutdown ?

Dante A. Disparte: As you mentioned, I was one of the founders of the now infamous Libra project, and despite lots of public articles and strong feelings about big tech and the power of big tech, my view was that I had unfinished work and that the work that Jeremy [Allaire, CEO of Circle] and the team here at Circle were building was the honest, unglamorous hard work that many crypto projects have failed to really appreciate and understand.

So, I came to Circle after facing intense global resistance to the Libra project,

because Circle was successfully implementing the precise structure that even Libra failed to fully grasp —state-based regulation in the U.S. A model built on trust, transparency, and, frankly, an unwavering leader in Jeremy, with the ability to assemble and empower a world-class leadership team. 

When I joined almost four years ago, we were roughly a hundred person company. Now, alongside Jeremy and our incredible team, I truly believe we’ve built something exceptional.

If we go back to 2014, Circle was not a stablecoin company at that time. How do you reflect on the company’s journey? 

For one, we are indeed a company that has seen the entire evolution of crypto markets. Jeremy as an entrepreneur, and Circle as a company, have evolved quite a lot to really build an infrastructure that supports world scale, population scale, access to regulated money. That is a big ambition for any business, but in some respects it also speaks to this idea of having a 10-year vision. Jeremy, as a strategist and as a CEO, thinks in very long-range evolutions of technology and money. Number one, the technology has to work. There's a reason USDC is a multi-chain innovation–meaning across multiple public blockchains–because we don't want to pick winners and losers, and we've stuck to that operating model for a reason. As the technology upgrades, USDC becomes the common denominator across all of the blockchains. Within more and more jurisdictions around the world, Circle’s way of doing business is becoming the legal basis for operating as a stablecoin issuer. If you do the world tour, we were the first major payment institution in Singapore to get licensed; the first major global issuer to comply with Canada’s listing rules, USDC was the first dollar stablecoin approved for use in Japan and in Dubai’s International Financial Centre. We're also proud of our investment in France as we are the first company in the world to be compliant under MICA with an e-money license, and we expect the same development here in the U.S.

There's two types of players in crypto. There's the race to the bottom part of the market, and then there's the race to the top part of the market. For us, we're really proud of the hard, long road, which is to race to the top. That's a race that includes competing with banks, with central banks, with regulators, with policymakers, the media, and fundamentally being able to survive the roller coaster ride that is crypto. In some ways, it's a survival story as much as it is a story of a long-term vision.

Can you define to us how U.S. And European regulator approaches are different? 

First, I have always taken the view that we should build for not only Atlantic harmonization, but global harmonization from a regulatory point of view. This is difficult because we live in a world that is very fragmented. There are a lot of reasons why regulators, finance ministries and central banks live in that silo or that fragmentation.

But when you're talking about something as powerful as digital money delivered on an internet connected mobile device–this so-called internet of value–then it actually is in the interest of all participants–including the governments–to build a globally harmonized regime for digital assets. The same way that the internet wouldn't really work if there was a European internet, an American internet and a Latin American internet. We need to push for this kind of global regulatory harmonization.

Here in the United States, Circle is regulated at the state level principally like PayPal, Apple Pay, Stripe because the U.S. states are the regulators of payments and that's an area where the United States is unique compared to Europe, the UK or other jurisdictions: the U.S. doesn't yet have a federal payment systems license.

Would you then say that the unique regime of the European Union makes it easier to navigate? 

As soon as you land as Charles de Gaulle [one of the Parisians airport], you have this regime that emerged in Europe: the markets and crypto assets framework [MiCA], which was years in the making, and I feel partly responsible for MiCA's development because it was a response to “Big Tech” and Libra. But nonetheless, I also feel a sense of pride to have been the first in line with Circle when MiCA became law. And to do so out of France was also in some ways a vindication personally, and for Circle as well, that if the rules were presented, companies would follow. MiCA treats stablecoins like USDC and our euro-denominated stablecoin EURC as electronic money. We think that's a phenomenal framework because it provides legal certainty for end users, regulatory clarity for businesses,  and establishes a common market of over 440 million people—allowing companies like ours to build a uniquely European business model with global impact.

Looking ahead, I believe the philosophy of what crypto represents actually extends far beyond its current market applications, and Europe is uniquely positioned to lead in getting that philosophy right. This is the region that first enshrined phone number portability as a consumer right, giving people control over their mobile identities. It is also the global leader in digital privacy rights. If any region can set the precedent for an open, user-first financial system, it’s Europe.

“Is it really your money if you have to pay someone to hold it for you, seek permission to spend it, or secure it?”

How would you apply that philosophy to digital assets? 

Imagine if Europe was also the region that allowed for global financial portability to be enshrined in the same way that you could take your phone number with you and your right to privacy with you. Imagine if your financial life could be decoupled from institutions. I think crypto technology, stablecoins, digital wallets, and regulated digital finance are the ways to accomplish that. But we need the policy vision in Europe and frankly, I think, in the United States to deliver that over the long term.

When it comes to stablecoins, the tokenized dollars are still way ahead of the tokenized euro in terms of usage and market share, to the point where one could even imagine that a euro stablecoin might never take off. What do you think about the current situation? 

In some respects, it's not surprising that the digital dollar, through the form of today's generation of stablecoins, is currently winning the so-called digital currency space race. That's not surprising in some ways because it's the original currency in crypto markets but it's also the pricing currency for all other crypto activity. Bitcoin, for example, is priced in dollars. It is the dollar reference and the direct dollar peg in crypto markets that have given the dollar the biggest flywheel globally. We, at Circle, think that the euro is a critical currency. This is why we have issued a digital euro stablecoin directly. We're pleased to report that it's the fastest growing and it's [one of] the largest digital euro stablecoins in circulation. Of course, it's starting from a small base, but our hope is that the market in Europe, the market through France and the ecosystem that we're trying to build, sees lots of growth for the digital euro as well. But in the end, this is a customer-driven and a customer-preference driven market, so the retail end-users have to start seeing a digital euro as a currency that they also want to support for their everyday activities in crypto finance. 

We have seen a lot of evolution in terms of stablecoins, between the centralized-issued ones, the decentralized, the algorithmic or the commodities-backed ones. How much does it impact the definition of money? 

It's a great question. The technical economic definition of money is that money has to meet three criteria: unit of measure, medium of exchange and store of value. One of the interesting rhetorical issues or philosophical issues that emerges with money, physical money, is that in many jurisdictions the physical money isn't worth the paper it is printed on or the price of the metal upon which it is stamped. You see this all over the world with hyperinflationary currencies like the Zimbabwean dollar, or the Venezuelan bolivar and there's many cases in which publicly-issued money has failed those three tests. 

But beyond economic definitions, a question remains: is it really your money if you have to pay someone to hold it for you, seek permission to spend it, or secure it? This is where I think of stablecoins not as competition with central banks, banks or with traditional money movement networks, but as completing unfinished work in that value chain. Stablecoins go where central banks and traditional banking infrastructure cannot: reaching hundreds of millions, if not billions of end users, who might have access to a basic internet connected device, but wouldn't be cost effective to be banked through the traditional financial system. That's the space where we think you can import the qualities of money, store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of measure, and give it the superpowers of the internet through digital tokens such that any basic internet connected device can now become a compliant payment endpoint. 

As a company, Circle still needs to collaborate with banks, though…

100% and therein lies the other interesting of the puzzle: when crypto was born as a technology,–out of the smoking crater that was the 2008 financial crisis–the foundational narrative of the industry was one democratizing finance, and disintermediating banks and rendering Wall Street irrelevant. Yet, the operating reality, if you're a company like Circle, and if you look at the total experience of these last 14 years of crypto emerging, is that it actually is an augmenting technology rather than a disruptive one. Which means that the more you could partner with banks, central banks, regulators and asset managers, the more you could actually build a value chain that is more resilient and doesn't break. MiCA, for instance, requires stablecoin issuers to hold a share of reserves in the banks. Fair enough. You're building an operating model in which all ships rise. But the key thing for us from a policy, technology, and regulatory point of view is we always have to preserve the vision of open money. The idea that you and I should be able to exchange value with each other as freely as we would exchange information and content, that's the fight. The partnership with banks actually makes for a better business model, more safety and soundness than to try to compete with banks.

We recently spoke with CleanSpark’s CEO, who mentioned that being the largest Bitcoin miner in operation isn’t necessarily the most important factor. USDT, the largest competing stablecoin, remains ahead of USDC. Is it that important for Circle to dethrone it? 

It's a good question. Obviously, MiCA has put in real impositions on the crypto exchanges and the issuers. There ARE two prongs in MiCA: one of them is that the issuer has to be compliant, which means you are registered in a European jurisdiction as an e-money issuer to continue circulating your token. The second prong with MICA is that the exchanges have to delist non-compliant tokens. That is not a choice we made; that is a choice the regulators and the policymakers made because they don't want European consumers to be affected by the next Terra Luna or the next blow-up in crypto markets. I think it's too premature in a market that is the entire addressable market encompassing all physical cash and all M2 money in the world–multiple trillions of dollars of real world value which are being tokenized–to merely look at near-term circulation as a proxy for total success.

We have great respect for the first of the stablecoin companies in this market as much as we have respect for future competitors. We should take competition with humility. Yet, we have learned a lot over the years in crypto that a lot of metrics matter in addition to circulation. How many mobile wallets are you reaching? How connected are you with the banking system? How connected are you with neo-banks? Outside of crypto trading platforms like Coinbase and Binance and other traditional firms, are you reaching new end users? Those are metrics that matter.

Another critical metric that matters of course is payment velocity and the type of activity you're enabling. That’s why, for the past three years, we’ve published the USDC economy report— to go beyond surface-level metrics and dive into how USDC and EURC are truly being used in the digital economy. It isn't just about short-term circulation and the current knife fight, if you will, in crypto markets.

You are personally a member of the Digital Currency Governance Consortium of the World Economic Forum. Could you share with us what is the importance of the digital currency topic in this institution? 

It is fascinating to have watched the crypto and the blockchain discussion go from the fringe to the core of the forum. In the same way that the AI discussion has become the core of many technology debates, crypto has transitioned into a key topic of discussion. At first, they'll try to ban the technology, then they try to replicate it, for example, through conversations around the tokenization of real-world assets, tokenized money market funds and different versions of blockchains. Another example is the debate around permissioned versus permissionless ledgers which has been the historical fight. Fast-forward to today, the policy makers and regulators have broadly accepted the permanence of digital assets and stablecoins, not at the fringe of finance, but at the core of finance. It has been the result of long, silent, thankless, consistent work delivered by myself, Jeremy, our colleagues, and a lot of our peer institutions that have tried to evolve the narrative of crypto as foundational technology. Our goal has always been neutrality, clear rule-making, and thoughtful policy design, ensuring that 400 million people in Europe have access to a regulated stablecoin.To do it permanently, you really need that kind of institutional mind shift to occur. 

One thing everyone can agree on is that time moves fast in crypto. Today’s landscape, with Bitcoin hovering around $100,000, is vastly different from 18 months ago when we first met. How do you see it evolving in the coming months?

One thing I've been advocating for consistently is that crypto as a technology and a sector will have truly matured when we stop calling it crypto, blockchain and all this jargon to describe the outcomes. Fintech companies are not described as cloud-native financial companies, it is just finance. Consumer market participants want to be able to compete on level playing fields. Some of us are just using newer technologies to deliver more competition and payments but at the end of the day, it's still a payment activity. And what I see occurring in the near term is convergence. MiCA, for example, its success or failure will be measured by the degree of competition it fosters. The morning after Circle announced it was MiCA-compliant, Societe Generale–not exactly a small bank–announced their euro-denominated deposit token, or EMT, under MiCA. That’s great because now you could say it's a level playing field with big operators, large operators, domestic and international operators all converging.

Yet, I would love to see a day when crypto finance is treated as finance, without requiring any special terms of art to describe the activity. That is one of the big expectations of U.S. legal and regulatory developments. In the U.S., we have three bills on stablecoins being debated in Congress and Senate, and a presidential executive order that clearly signals the US aims to lead in this space. What's becoming clear is that the United States is no longer playing a game of technology gradualism—but is embracing  a spirit of technology optimism. 

The ECB recently went back to the prospect of the European CBDC. Is it a threat to you? 

To me, it’s unfortunate because I’m not a fan of Central Bank digital currencies in general. It's a bit like Europe trying to compete with the internet by designing an intranet. And while I completely appreciate the message that I think Madame Lagarde and the European Central Bank are sending around monetary and payment system sovereignty, the reality is that if you want a currency to compete in the 21st century, you also need to express that currency as a native financial innovation on the internet itself.

And herein lies the real crux of winning the digital currency space race is that number one, whenever a central bank chooses to make that bet on its own, it's betting against its local industry, its local technologies, and its local investors. You're also then making a global bet against Moore's law. After the Bretton Woods system was established, the U.S. dollar became ubiquitous around the world as a reserve currency not just through policy, but through private sector innovation. Companies like Moneygram, Western Union, Swift, Visa, Mastercard and even paper checks, all played a role in making the dollar omnipresent-competing on a rules-based level for moving dollars around the world. 

I would love personally to see the euro enjoy that same dynamism and same free market competition around digital euros as well. Yet, the second the Central Bank crabs out private sector competition for the movement of physical money and digital money, the Central Bank ends up killing competition.

I go back to this analogy of aviation: safety authorities do not fly planes and build jet engines. They designate the rules of the skies and ultimately, you have the choice as a consumer.