Bankless · Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Circle emphasizes its strength in providing institutional-grade on- and off-ramps, leveraging its banking relationships and experience with USDC. For ARK, the focus is on developing retail-focused on-ramps, facilitating cross-border transactions with local stablecoins, and provisioning liquidity through mechanisms like StableFX and partnerships with market makers.
“Yes, we do have good institutional-grader on-off ramps. Users currently get access to these on-off ramps primarily through exchanges. I think everybody understands that. We are working on more retail-focused on-off ramps. They are part of the ARK launch.”
“And there we have a ton of experience in provisioning liquidity around the world. We understand the cost structure of provisioning that liquidity. We also, we talked a little bit about stable FX, which is our ability to sort of swap these local currencies into USDC or some other stable coin.”
“So that's where the full stack argument matters, which is to say like, yes, is it like another L1? Or is it like, does it have applications on top of it? And absolutely it has applications on top of it, which is to say the applications are the stablecoins. the marketplaces to trade those stablecoins and the pools of like liquidity that will make it possible for those marketplaces to exist and the additional circle products that are needed to actually enable those pools of the pools of capital to be successful and like be profitable.”