According to Woofun AI, Circle (CRCL.US) officially landed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and simultaneously launched the institutional chain Arc, marking that USDC reached a dual strategic milestone on September 16. This layout aims to reshape the competitive landscape of the stablecoin market through deep binding of top institutions such as BLK.US (BLK.US), Visa (V.US), and Mastercard (MA.US).
This move is not only an extension of traditional financial infrastructure, but also a key step in Circle's attempt to break through the oligopolistic stablecoin circuit using compliance barriers and capital operations. From listing financing to the construction of a public chain ecosystem, Circle is trying to upgrade USDC from a simple payment instrument to a core underlying asset connecting traditional finance with Web3. The logical chain behind it involves complex distribution of benefits, technical restructuring, and regulatory games.
The stablecoin market is not an inclusive circuit with a low threshold; rather, it is characterized by extreme oligopoly. ARK Invest analyst Lorenzo Valente's data reveals a harsh reality: stablecoins with a market capitalization of over $1 billion have only slowly grown from single digits to 12 in the past four years; while the top players with a market capitalization surpassing $10 billion, there are still 4 of them at their peak in 2022, and now only Tether and Circle remain.
This cliff-style decline in players profoundly reflects the core logic of network-effect assets — whether it's an exchange, payment network, or DeFi protocol, the willingness to access them depends entirely on the size and depth of the asset. Every time the threshold is raised one level, potential competitors are drastically reduced, because the scale itself forms the strongest moat. The current competitive focus of the market is no longer simply technical iteration, but rather who can maintain the existing scale threshold, who can climb upward through rules, and how regulation and capital power can push this zero-sum game in a new direction.
Looking back at the evolution of USDC, it was born with a clear compliance mission. In 2018, the CENTRE Alliance, initiated by Circle and Coinbase (COIN.US), launched USDC. Its official position has always emphasized regulatory cooperation and transparency of reserves, with the aim of targeting USDT, which was leading in scale at the time but whose transparency was often questioned.
However, early markets placed more emphasis on liquidity than compliance certificates, and USDT's first-mover scale advantage forced USDC to remain an 'alternative' for a long time. Circle's path to capitalization was also full of twists and turns. Plans to go public via SPAC in 2021 ended in failure at the end of 2022. Even more fatal was the Silicon Valley banking crisis in March 2023, when Circle's reserve capital of about $3.3 billion was trapped in a failed bank, causing USDC to briefly fall off anchor to $0.87.
This incident revealed the weakest weakness of stablecoin companies — their credit systems are deeply tied to the safety of traditional banking systems, and any storm in traditional finance will directly spread to the price stability of crypto assets.
According to data compiled by Woofun AI, Circle spent two years reconstructing its 'compliance narrative' after experiencing the crisis, and finally successfully landed on the New York Stock Exchange on June 5, 2025, under the stock code CRCL, becoming the first major stablecoin issuer to complete an IPO. The IPO price was set at 31 US dollars, with an initial offering of 34 million shares, corresponding to a total issuance scale of about 1.05 billion US dollars; a week later, the underwriter fully exercised the green shoe options, and the total scale increased to about 1.2 billion US dollars.
According to the capital flow, Circle issued 14.8 million shares during the initial issuance, and 19.2 million shares were sold by early shareholders; after the exercise of Green Shoe, Circle issued a total of about 1.9 million shares, with a net income of about US$583 million after deducting underwriting fees. The market reaction was extremely enthusiastic. The opening day was 122.58%, closing up 168.5%, and the market capitalization broke through $18 billion; the next day, the stock price hit a record high of $298.99; by June 23, the stock price hit an all-time high of $298.99, then fell nearly 40% over the next four trading days. This is one of the highest first-day gains in US IPOs of over $1 billion in recent decades, highlighting the capital market's extremely high valuation expectations for compliant stablecoin issuers.
The financial structure disclosed in the prospectus reveals the essence of Circle's business. As of April 2025, USDC's circulation is around $60.1 billion, accounting for about 29% of the stablecoin market, while USDT's share is around 61%. In 2024, Circle's total revenue reached $1,676 billion, of which 99% came from interest income from reserve assets. This model is likened by the industry to a “narrow bank”: it does not lend, and only invests absorbed capital into short-term US bonds to earn interest spreads.
However, most of this business needs to be distributed to distribution channels. Circle paid Coinbase approximately $908 million in 2024, or about 54% of total revenue for the year. The acquisition of shares is not a natural evolution; it is a channel agreement in exchange for real money. Take Binance as an example. In December 2024, the two sides reached a strategic partnership. Binance promised to hold at least $3 billion of its own treasury in USDC, and Circle paid about $60.25 million in prepaid fees and set up ongoing incentives linked to the balance.
Furthermore, Circle relies on the official cross-chain protocol CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol) and uses a 'destroy-mint' mechanism to implement native USDC deployment on more than 20 public chains, avoiding the complexity of Wrapped Token. In contrast, Tether's later launch of USDT0 attempted to address the fragmentation of liquidity, but chose a different technical route of LayerZero locking-casting.
To break through the scale bottleneck of simple coin issuance, Circle shifted its strategic focus to the infrastructure layer. Arc Public Chain and its sister product, Circle Payments Network (CPN), aim to address institutional cross-border payments and asset tokenization needs. In May 2026, Arc completed private equity financing of native tokens, raising US$222 million, with a fully diluted network valuation of US$3 billion, led by a16z, with BlackRock, Apollo (APO.US), and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE.US) participating. As a result, Circle became the first US stock company to privately place tokens after listing. Currently, these tokens are institutional-only, and come with multi-year lock-up, governance voting, and staking features that will be enabled after the network switches to PoS.
This move is intended to transform institutions such as BlackRock, Visa, and Mastercard from simple asset holders to Arc's founding validators, making them directly involved in transaction verification and cybersecurity maintenance, thus creating a deeper bond of interest. Compared to Robinhood (HOOD.US) Chain's model of relying on retail traffic, Arc is trying to build an institutional-level Layer 1 public chain by introducing financial institutions and ready-made infrastructure stacks. USDC was once hyped up to 1.8 times the premium before it went live, reflecting the market's expectations for its ecological potential.
Although USDC's growth rate has outperformed USDT for two consecutive years — USDC grew 77% and USDT grew 50% in 2024; USDC grew 73% to $75.1 billion in 2025, and USDT grew 36% to $186.6 billion — the size gap is still huge, and USDC is still less than half of USDT. Entering 2026, the USDC growth rate slowed, and the year-on-year growth rate fell back to 19% in the second quarter, at a scale of about $73.3 billion. When the earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2025 was announced, Circle's stock price jumped nearly 30% due to the higher-than-expected performance of total revenue and reserve revenue of US$770 million, indicating that the capital market values profit more than simple scale.
However, regulatory risks have always peaked. At the end of March, rumours that the new draft “CLARITY Act” might prohibit interest sharing of stablecoins caused CRCL to fall; on September 17, Circle's stock price closed at $85.09, with a market value of about US$21.6 billion, down 70% from its all-time high. On the same day, the Federal Reserve announced a 25 basis point rate hike, and the US Senate procedural vote failed to advance the CLARITY Act. Weakening regulatory expectations combined with changes in the interest rate environment suppressed market sentiment. Arc's success or failure will determine whether USDC can actually go back and forth through the “compliance for scale” strategy, or repeat the meme mistake of fast moving in and out of hot money.