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Circle Rides on Strong USDC Adoption: What's the Path Ahead?

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Key Takeaways

  • USDC in circulation surged 90% year over year to $61.3B, with onchain volume nearing $6T.
  • New launches like Circle Payments Network and Circle Gateway boost adoption with 100+ institutions.
  • Circle posted Q2 2025 revenue of $658.1M, up 53% year over year, with shares rising 53% since IPO.

Circle Internet Group (CRCL - Free Report) is benefiting from strong adoption USDC stablecoin. At the end of the second quarter of 2025, USDC in circulation grew 90% year over year to $61.3 billion and has grown an additional 6.4% to $65.2 billion as of Aug. 10, 2025. USDC onchain transaction volume grew 5.4 times year over year to nearly $6 trillion, while Meaningful wallets (defined as wallets holding more than $10 of USDC) surged 68% year over year, indicating growing USDC adoption globally.

Stablecoins benefit from the passage of the GENIUS Act on July 18, paving the way for more enterprise adoption. The launch of Circle Payments Network in May, a platform for financial institutions to use stablecoins for payments, with more than 100 institutions in the pipeline, is a game-changer. Circle Gateway, introduced in July, enables seamless cross-chain USDC usage and is currently supported by eight new blockchain partners. An expanding partner base that includes the likes of Binance, Corpay, FIS, Fiserv and OKX is noteworthy.

Circle now offers a yield token, USYC, which can be used in both digital assets and traditional capital markets as collateral with anytime liquidity between USYC and USDC. The company’s expanded partnership with Binance now makes USYC available as collateral, thereby accelerating adoption.

These factors are expected to drive Circle’s top-line growth. In second-quarter 2025, Circle reported total revenues and reserve income of $658.1 million, up 53% year over year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for third-quarter 2025 revenues is pegged at $668.7 million and $2.58 billion for 2025.

CRCL's Revenue Estimates

 

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Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

 

Circle Faces Tough Competition

Circle faces stiff competition from the likes of Strategy (MSTR - Free Report) and IREN Limited (IREN - Free Report) in the cryptocurrency space. 

Strategy is the world’s largest bitcoin treasury company, holding 628,791 bitcoins as of July 29, 2025. The liberal policies of U.S. President Donald Trump have been a key catalyst in driving the adoption of bitcoin. Strategy now expects to achieve a bitcoin yield of 30% and $20 billion in gains, assuming the bitcoin price hits $150,000 at the end of the year.

IREN Limited is one of the world’s largest and lowest-cost Bitcoin miners, achieving 326% year-over-year hashrate growth in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. IREN Limited achieved its 50 EH/s installed hashrate target in June. 50 EH/s generates roughly $830 million annualized hardware profit. IREN Limited is expanding its GPU fleet with the purchase of an additional 4.2k Blackwell B200 GPUs from NVIDIA, which doubled its total fleet to approximately 8.5k NVIDIA GPUs.

Share Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates

Circle shares have appreciated 53% since the initial public offering on June 5, outperforming the broader Zacks Finance sector’s return of 7.3%.

CRCL Stock’s Performance

 

Zacks Investment Research
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

 

The CRCL stock is trading at a premium, as suggested by the Value Score of F.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2025 earnings is pegged at $1.10 per share, unchanged over the past 30 days.
 

 

 

Circle currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.


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