Last June, Circle went public at $31 per share. Two weeks later, the stock price touched $299. Then it fell back to $50, a drop of over 80%. Then, when the financial report was released in February this year, it doubled in two weeks, reaching $111 today.

During the same period, Bitcoin dropped by 40%. Circle's stock price has decoupled from the crypto market.

"You are seeing that decoupling."

The drop to $50 is not difficult to understand within the circle.

In September and October 2025, the Federal Reserve cut the benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points twice, bringing it down to 3.75%. The reserve yield subsequently declined, with Q3 data showing that the yield on USDC reserves per unit decreased by 96 basis points year-on-year.

What does this 96 basis points mean? Circle calculated in its prospectus that for every 100 basis point cut by the Fed, the annual interest income loss is approximately $618 million. Half of the loss would be offset due to declining distribution costs, resulting in a net loss of about $300 million. But this is just a static estimate, assuming USDC's size remains unchanged. In total, the Fed cut rates by 75 basis points in 2025, and just with this single variable in interest rates, it took nearly $200 million from Circle's annual revenue.

And it is not over. There is a revenue-sharing agreement between Circle and Coinbase. All reserve income generated from USDC held on the Coinbase platform belongs to Coinbase, while the income from holdings outside the platform is split evenly between the two. In Q4, total reserve income was $733 million, with distribution costs at $461 million, leaving Circle with a net reserve income of $273 million. Non-interest income was $37 million, less than 5% of total revenue.

This structure is the fundamental reason why Circle's stock price fell from $299 to $50. Rate cuts compress reserve yields, the Coinbase revenue-sharing structure is fixed, leaving Circle in the middle with a clear ceiling on how much revenue it can keep and a clear floor on how much profit it can retain.

However, on February 25, when the financial report came out, Circle's stock surged by 35% in a single day.

EPS was $0.43, while analysts expected $0.16. This was not a small beat; it was an overwhelming surprise. But what drove the repricing was not just the numbers in this quarterly report, but a larger structural fact that this report revealed to the market for the first time.

In 2025, the total market capitalization of crypto fell by over 40% from its peak. During this period, the circulating supply of USDC increased by 72%, reaching $75.3 billion, a new all-time high. The total market cap of stablecoins also exceeded $314 billion during the same period, also a historical high.

This is not a tailwind in a bull market; it is a headwind in a bear market.

The significance of this for Circle's pricing logic is fundamental. Previously, the market viewed the valuation framework for CRCL as a beneficiary of the crypto cycle, with increased usage of USDC in bull markets and reduced on-chain activity in bear markets. Coinbase's logic follows this; trading volume is everything, and in a bear market, fee income falls off a cliff.

But the data from 2025 disproves this framework. USDC's growth did not stop in the bear market; not only did it not stop, but it accelerated.

Circle CEO Allaire stated on the earnings call, "You are seeing that decoupling." He was referring to the decoupling between BTC and stablecoins. But the other half of what he didn't say is that the use case for stablecoins is shifting from being a pricing unit for crypto trading to becoming the settlement infrastructure for global payments.

The driving force is no longer speculative trading demand; instead, a group of participants who have never appeared in the crypto space are starting to come in. Visa announced it would expand the USDC settlement range, allowing U.S. Visa card issuers to complete settlements using USDC beyond normal banking hours. Mastercard followed suit. JPMorgan launched several USDC-related products last year. Intuit announced a partnership with Circle to bring low-cost programmable payments to its tens of millions of business and personal customers. Polymarket completed a large migration making USDC the core settlement asset.

This is not crypto-native users depositing and withdrawing money. This is traditional financial institutions embedding USDC into their payment settlement pipelines. These two use cases correspond to completely different valuation logics. The former moves with the crypto cycle, while the latter moves with global payment volumes. The global cross-border payment market is about $150 trillion annually, while USDC's on-chain transaction volume in one quarter is $11.9 trillion, a year-on-year increase of 247%. These two numbers cannot be directly compared, but the market is starting to price Circle with the second framework.

GENIUS Act, and a Pure Entry Ticket

There is a saying circulating widely within the circle: "If your argument is that stablecoins will take over global payments, CRCL is the most direct bet. COIN is an integrated system that indirectly benefits from USDC distribution, and the two are different tools corresponding to different theses."

This statement explains why $CRCL was able to break out independently while Coinbase's stock price was stagnant. Coinbase operates as an exchange, a wallet, develops the Base chain, and provides institutional custody; USDC is just one of many business lines for it. Circle does one thing: issuing and circulating USDC. If you want to bet on stablecoins as a sector, there is only one pure target available in the market.

This logic became clearer after the passage of the GENIUS Act.

In July 2025, the act established the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, requiring compliant issuers to hold 100% cash or short-term Treasury bond-backed reserves and to undergo regular audits. On the day the GENIUS Act was enacted, $CRCL surged by 34% in a single day. The market understood this signal. This was not just a compliance boon; it was a regulatory moat drawn between USDC and USDT, a line that Tether cannot cross in the short term.

JPMorgan's data corroborated this judgment, showing a 19% overall growth in the stablecoin market after the act's passage, with USDC's market share rising from 24% at the beginning of the year to 25.5%, while Tether fell from 67.5% to 60.4%. The figures for on-chain transaction volume were even more direct, with USDC surpassing USDT in Q4, capturing about 50% of stablecoin on-chain transaction volumes, marking the first time Tether has been outpaced in this dimension in years.

However, Tether did not concede defeat. After the passage of the GENIUS Act, Tether launched USAT, partnering with Anchorage Digital and Cantor Fitzgerald to specifically design reserves according to GENIUS standards. The CEO of USAT, Bo Hines, is a former White House crypto advisor. Currently, USAT's circulating supply is around $20 million, nearly negligible compared to USDC's $75.3 billion, but Tether holds the world's largest stablecoin user network, and Cantor Fitzgerald brings Wall Street relationships, which is not a combination to be underestimated.

Meanwhile, several names that have never appeared in the stablecoin space are also coming in. Fidelity issued FIDD, running on Ethereum, with 100% GENIUS standard reserves, targeting both institutions and retail. Robinhood and Revolut are reportedly developing their own stablecoins. JPMorgan and US Bancorp are expanding their stablecoin plans. After acquiring Bridge, Stripe embedded stablecoin payment pipelines into its $1.9 trillion annual payment volume. Treasury Secretary Bessent said that the U.S. stablecoin market could reach $3.7 trillion by the end of this decade. USDC's current $75.3 billion is less than 3% of that figure.

The GENIUS Act opened not just Circle's door; it opened the doors of the entire traditional financial system. The first-mover advantage is real: support for 30 native blockchains, deep ties with Visa and JPMorgan, and years of accumulated enterprise API infrastructure—these are not things that new entrants can replicate in just a year or two. Bernstein gave a target price of $190, citing the regulatory moat and competitive barriers of the technology stack.

But the depth of that moat is an unknown until a true stress test arrives. Another question that is seldom discussed openly is that Circle and Coinbase's revenue-sharing contract has a fixed term, and during the next round of negotiations, Coinbase will not have any less leverage than it does now, with USDC's proportion held on its platform rising from 5% in 2022 to 22% now. The outcome of those negotiations will directly impact how much Circle can actually retain from USDC's growth.

$23 billion, Betting on a Story That Hasn't Happened Yet

Circle's current valuation is largely based on a story that has not yet happened.

Allaire spent a considerable amount of time on the earnings call discussing the payment needs of AI Agents. When executing autonomous tasks, AI Agents require small, high-frequency, cross-time-zone payments, accessing APIs, purchasing computing power, and completing cross-border settlements. Allaire referred to this scenario as the "machine economy," arguing that when the number of AI Agents surpasses the number of human users, the primary users of payment infrastructure will no longer be humans but machines.

These needs in traditional payment systems create friction at every step. Credit cards have operating hour restrictions, require human authorization, and the minimum fee structure makes payments below $0.01 economically unfeasible. Stripe charges a minimum of $0.30 plus 2.9%, while Visa and Mastercard's cross-border fees average between 1.5% and 3%, and bank wire transfers do not operate on weekends.

USDC has none of these technical restrictions, operating 24/7, settling on-chain with single transaction costs below $0.001 on high-speed chains like Solana, with an Arc target of $0.00001. Circle specifically developed payment infrastructure for AI Agents, and the Arc testnet is already live. This is not just a "slightly cheaper" improvement; it represents an order-of-magnitude difference in the entire cost structure.

Mark Palmer, an analyst at Benchmark-StoneX, put it plainly: "AI Agents need programmable currency that can be directly embedded into software workflows and cannot have long settlement windows," whereas card organizations' infrastructures are designed for human checkout processes, not for machines.

How real this demand is can be seen in the speed of action at the protocol level.

Coinbase launched the x402 protocol in May 2025, using the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code to enable automated payments by AI Agents, allowing servers to directly request USDC payment before responding to requests without human authorization. Five months later, x402 processed over 100 million payments. Google launched AP2 (Agent Payment Protocol), and OpenAI is internally testing "Instant Checkout" in ChatGPT, with Stripe and stablecoin tracks forming the underlying settlement layer. These are not white papers; they are infrastructures already running in production environments.

Visa's data provided an anchor point for perceiving scale. By November 2025, Visa's monthly flow settled through stablecoins annualized around $3.5 billion, and by January 2026, it had risen to an annualized $4.5 billion. Compared to Visa's total annual transaction volume of about $16 trillion, this figure is nearly negligible. But the change in direction is more noteworthy than the absolute value, as Visa itself is expanding this pipeline. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also expressed the same judgment in early March, stating, "Soon, the number of AI Agents initiating transactions will surpass that of humans."

The gap between narrative and reality is clearly illustrated by the data.

In the past 30 days, the total transaction volume of x402 was $24 million, involving 94,000 buyers and 22,000 sellers. Meanwhile, the global e-commerce market is estimated to reach $6.88 trillion. McKinsey estimates that the current real payment use of stablecoins is about $390 billion annually, with B2B accounting for approximately $226 billion and retail even less. ECB data indicates that organic retail transfers account for about 0.5% of the total stablecoin flow.

Circle recorded a net loss of $70 million for the entire year of 2025. The Arc mainnet is scheduled to launch in 2026, and it remains in the testnet phase for now. AI and non-interest income combined accounted for less than 5% of total revenue throughout the year.

Gartner predicts that the AI Agent economy will reach $30 trillion by 2030, while Bessent forecasts that the stablecoin market could reach $3.7 trillion by the end of this decade. If these numbers are real, Circle's current USDC circulating size of $75.3 billion is indeed just the starting point. However, from the $24 million transaction volume of x402 to the $30 trillion Agent economy, there is a road that no one has walked before.

The $23 billion market capitalization being bet on is that this road will be completed.

Circle went public last June at $31, surged to $299 two weeks later, then fell back to $50, and now has doubled again. There is one question that has never really been answered within this curve: What kind of company is Circle ultimately?

Is it an interest rate arbitrage business, a compliant stablecoin infrastructure, or the settlement layer of the AI economy? Allaire said, "You are seeing that decoupling," but where the decoupling leads to is another question.

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