Circle

Circle issues stablecoins and sells the plumbing around them. The core product is USDC, a token redeemable one-for-one for US dollars, with about $75 billion outstanding in late September 2026. Around it sit a euro token (EURC), a tokenised money market fund (USYC), a cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP), a payments network for banks and fintechs (Circle Payments Network), wallet and developer APIs, and since September 2026 its own layer-1 blockchain, Arc.

Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville founded the company in Boston in October 2013. It started as a consumer bitcoin wallet and payments app, bought the Poloniex exchange in 2018 and sold it in 2019, and launched USDC with Coinbase in 2018 through a joint body called Centre. Centre was dissolved in August 2023, leaving Circle as the sole issuer and governor of USDC. A 2022 plan to go public by merging with Concord Acquisition Corp was called off; the company listed through a conventional IPO in June 2025 instead.

Allaire is still chairman and CEO. Neville left the board on 25 September 2026, and CFO Jeremy Fox-Geen said the same day he would step down by the end of 2026, according to an 8-K filing.

Regulated entities, as listed in the 2025 10-K and later filings: a French electronic money institution that issues USDC and EURC under MiCA, a Major Payments Institution licence in Singapore, a New York limited-purpose trust company (charter granted 31 July 2026) and a national trust bank supervised by the OCC.

Every USDC in circulation is a liability of Circle, matched by reserves held for holders' benefit. At the end of 2025 about 88% of USDC reserves were in the Circle Reserve Fund, a Rule 2a-7 government money market fund managed by BlackRock, open only to Circle, with assets in custody at BNY. The remaining 10–20% is cash in accounts titled for the benefit of USDC holders, mostly at global systemically important banks. Circle says it does not lend, borrow against or encumber reserves. Reserve composition is attested monthly by an outside accountant. The group's own accounts are audited by Deloitte, which has audited Circle since 2023.

Minting and redemption at par run through Circle Mint, which is for verified businesses and institutions. Everyone else buys and sells USDC through exchanges and apps, which settle with Circle behind the scenes. For how this compares with other issuers on reserves, redemption and peg record, see our USDC card and the stablecoin ratings.

The weak point showed up in March 2023. Circle had $3.3 billion of reserves, about 8% of the total, on deposit at Silicon Valley Bank when it failed. USDC fell to roughly $0.87 on 11 March and was back near $0.99 by 13 March, once US regulators guaranteed all SVB deposits. The reserves existed the whole time. The problem was that holders could not reach them over a weekend. Moving most of the reserve into a Treasury money market fund at BNY was the fix for that.

USDC contracts include a blocklist function, and Circle has used it. Its stated rule, repeated by Allaire in April 2026, is that it freezes addresses on the direction of law enforcement or a court, not on its own judgment in real time. That rule got tested twice in two weeks. On 23 March 2026 Circle froze 16 business hot wallets under a sealed New York civil case, which hit exchanges and payment firms that on-chain investigators could not link to each other. It began unfreezing some of them three days later. On 1 April attackers drained about $280 million from Drift Protocol on Solana and moved roughly $230 million of USDC to Ethereum through Circle's own CCTP bridge over several hours. Circle did not freeze it, and a Drift user filed a class action in Massachusetts federal court.

USDC makes up nearly all of the balance sheet, but Circle now runs several products that stack on top of it:

Arc is the one to watch. It launched with permissioned validators. Circle named BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo and Visa as founding validators. Circle has also sold an ARC token to institutions before mainnet. In May 2026 a group led by a16z crypto bought 740 million ARC at $0.30, about $222 million at a stated $3 billion fully diluted valuation, and a second closing in late June added 67.5 million tokens for about $20 million. Buyers are locked up for at least a year after Arc moves to proof-of-stake, and they can claim repayment if that move has not happened by 8 May 2028 (8-K). ARC is not USDC and has nothing to do with USDC's reserves.

Circle is a spread business. It invests USDC reserves in short-dated government paper and keeps the interest, because holders earn nothing from Circle directly. In Q2 2026 reserve income was $668 million out of $701 million total revenue. The reserve return rate was 3.5%, down from 4.1% a year earlier, so every cut in US rates comes straight out of the top line.

Most of that income is paid out again. Distribution and transaction costs were $410 million in Q2 2026, about 58% of revenue. The largest recipient is Coinbase. Under the Collaboration Agreement it gets reserve income on the USDC held on its platform plus half of what remains from wider ecosystem growth. Binance is the other big distributor. In September 2026 the two firms replaced their earlier deals with a five-year arrangement under which Circle pays Binance a monthly fee tied to USDC held through Circle's wallet infrastructure. Binance bought $100 million of Circle stock at $80.84 a share at the same time (8-K).

Figures come from the 2025 10-K and Q2 2026 10-Q. The 2025 loss is almost entirely an accounting charge: compensation expense jumped to $503 million in Q2 2025, when share awards vested at the IPO.

CRCL is the ticker of Circle Internet Group, Inc., the company behind USDC. Its Class A shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange. It is not a crypto token. Owning CRCL gives you no claim on USDC reserves, and holding USDC gives you no share of Circle's profits.

• IPO priced on 4 June 2025 at $31, above the $27–28 range, after the deal was upsized to 34 million shares (14.8 million from Circle, 19.2 million from existing holders).
• Trading began on 5 June 2025. Shares opened at $69 and closed the first day up 168%, according to CoinDesk and CNBC.
• Including the underwriters' over-allotment, which was exercised in full, the offering raised about $1.2 billion.
• Circle followed with a secondary offering in August 2025 and sold new shares to Binance in a $100 million private placement in September 2026.

We do not track share prices or give stock forecasts. For CRCL quotes, use an exchange or brokerage feed. This profile covers the company, not the equity.

USDC supply is the number to watch. It rose from $43.9 billion at the end of 2024 to about $79.6 billion in March 2026, fell to $73.3 billion by 30 June while crypto prices dropped, and was back around $75 billion in late September. Circle reported that on-chain USDC transaction volume in Q2 2026 was $14.8 trillion, up 151% year on year. That figure shows how much USDC moves around, but it is not a measure of how much of it is held.