Building Circle with Sean Neville (@psneville) has been one of the great privileges of my life. From our earliest days as co-founders, through his years as an executive and his service on our board, Sean’s vision and commitment have helped shape Circle in ways that will endure. I’m deeply grateful for everything he has given this company. Sean is stepping off the board, and I would have loved for him to stay. But Catena’s continuing success, including the recent milestone of preliminary conditional OCC approval for its national trust bank charter application, deserves his full focus. I’m proud of what he’s building and excited for what comes next. Sean, thank you for your leadership, your friendship and your extraordinary service to Circle. I’ll always be cheering you on!

Take the Leap, @Anthropic There's been a lot of debate about whether now is the right moment for Anthropic to complete its IPO. Markets are jittery, the calendar is crowded, the valuation conversation is loud. And most importantly, there are valid, serious concerns about the safety of these technologies.  But I want to make the case for why going public will be a net good for society. Not as a bystander, but as someone who took a company through this exact door fifteen months ago, in a sector that was  contested. When Circle listed on the NYSE, we were operating critical financial infrastructure in a space defined by technical complexity, fast-moving regulation, and deep public skepticism. A lot of people thought the smart move was to stay private, keep our heads down, and let the noise settle. What we found was the reverse. Going public didn't expose us to scrutiny we couldn't handle. It gave us the highest-standard framework in the world for demonstrating that we deserved trust. Audited financials. Quarterly disclosure. Independent board governance. Sarbanes-Oxley controls. Real-time accountability to millions of shareholders and to regulators in every market we serve. The result wasn't fragility. It was confidence. Banks, governments, and enterprise partners who had been cautious about stablecoins could finally look at us through a lens they already understood.  Going public wasn't just good for us and our shareholders.  Public-market discipline turned a novel technology into legible infrastructure. But public-market discipline is only half of that equation. The other half is clear rules of the road. Innovation at infrastructure scale needs both: companies willing to subject themselves to transparency and accountability, and policymakers willing to define durable standards for how that technology can operate. For stablecoins, the GENIUS Act helped provide that regulatory architecture - moving the conversation from whether the technology belonged inside the regulated financial system to the standards under which it could operate there. That distinction matters for AI. An IPO cannot substitute for fit-for-purpose public policy, and regulation cannot substitute for the discipline of public markets. They are complements. One makes companies legible to investors and the public; the other establishes the obligations, protections, and boundaries that allow an emerging technology to earn durable institutional trust. AI is at precisely that moment now, and the stakes are higher. Frontier AI companies are becoming core infrastructure for the global economy. Their model capabilities, safety practices, compute commitments, revenue concentration, and governance structures are matters of genuine public interest. Right now, most of that lives inside private companies, visible to a handful of investors and whoever reads the leaks. An IPO changes that. It brings a frontier lab into the most rigorous disclosure and governance regime humanity has built. It forces clarity about risks, dependencies, and how decisions get made. It gives the public, policymakers, and the market a durable way to hold the company accountable, not through episodic drama, but through the boring, relentless cadence of public reporting. Anthropic has built its identity around safety and transparency. The public markets are the institutional embodiment of those values. Yes, the timing is never perfect. It wasn't for us either. But there's a window right now where the world is asking hard questions about who controls the most powerful technology of our era and how. The best answer isn't a press release. It's an S-1, a listed ticker, and the accountability that comes with them. We should be encouraging these great companies to take the leap to public markets, to subject themselves to public scrutiny and accountability, and we as a society need to do our part to hold them to the highest standards.