Last June, Circle was listed at $31 per share. Two weeks later, the stock price touched $299. Then, down 50 dollars, down over 80 percent. And then this February, the February, the two-week double, today, 111 dollars。

In the same period, double, bitcoin fell 40 percent. Circe's share price, and the connection to the encryption market, is broken。

"You're seeing that kind of decoupling."

It's not hard to understand the fall to $50。

In September and October 2025, the Federal Reserve dropped its base rate to 3.75 per cent on two consecutive occasions. The reserve rate of return followed, and Q3 data show that the USDC unit reserve rate of return decreased by 96 basis points per year。

How much does a 96 base point mean? In its statement of claim, Circe calculated that the Federal Reserve lost approximately $618 million in annualized interest income per reduction of 100bp. Half of the losses would be offset by a decline in distribution costs, with a net loss of about 300 million. But it's only static, provided that the size of USDC remains unchanged. In 2025, the Federal Reserve dropped a total of 75bp, and interest rates alone took almost $200 million from the annual revenues of Circle。

Not yet. There is a profit-sharing agreement between Circle and Coinbase. The total return on reserves from USDC held on the Coinbase platform is Coinbase, with two five-and-a-half units outside the platform. Q4 Total reserve income of $733 million, distribution cost of $461 million, and actual retained net reserve income of $273 million by Circle. Non-interest income of $370 million represents less than 5 per cent of total operating income。

This structure is the root cause of the fall in the price of the Circe stock from $299 to $50. The interest-rate compression reserve rate of return, Coinbase ' s fixed structure, and the Circle ' s in the middle, have a clear income ceiling and a clear profit floor。

But February 25, when the newspaper came out, Circe went up 35 percent a day。

EPS 0.43 AND ANALYSTS EXPECT $0.16. IT'S NOT A SMALL AMOUNT OF EXCESS, IT'S A FACE SWING. BUT IT IS NOT ONLY THE FIGURES IN THIS QUARTERLY REPORT, BUT RATHER THE LARGER STRUCTURAL FACT THAT DRIVES THE RE-PRICING, WHICH ONLY ALLOWS THE MARKET TO SEE IT FOR THE FIRST TIME。

IN 2025, THE MARKET VALUE OF THE WHOLE ENCRYPTION FELL FROM ITS PEAK TO OVER 40 PER CENT. DURING THIS PERIOD, THE CIRCULATION OF USDC ROSE BY 72 PER CENT TO $75.3 BILLION, A RECORD HIGH. THE TOTAL MARKET VALUE OF THE STABLE CURRENCY ALSO EXCEEDED $314 BILLION OVER THE SAME PERIOD, WITH THE SAME RECORD HIGH。

It's not the wind, it's the contrast。

The meaning of this matter, the pricing logic for Circle is fundamental. The previous valuation framework given to CRCL by the market was used as a beneficiary of the encryption cycle, with USDC trading in the cattle market, on a growing scale, reducing chain activity and on a smaller scale. That is the logic of Coinbase, where trade volumes are fatal and bear market fees are cut off。

BUT THE DATA FOR 2025 NEGATED THE FRAMEWORK. THE GROWTH OF USDC HAS NOT STOPPED, NOT ONLY IN BEAR CITY, BUT ALSO ACCELERATED。

"You're seeing that decoupling." He's talking about the decoupling between the BTC and the stabilizer. But the phrase that he did not complete was that the use of the stable currency was shifting from the unit of account for encrypted transactions to the global payment clearing infrastructure。

The driving force is no longer the demand for speculative trading, but a group of participants who have never appeared in an encrypted track have begun to enter. Visa announced an expansion of the USDC settlement to allow the United States Visa Card Bank to complete the settlement with USDC beyond normal bank hours, followed by Mastercard, where Morgan Chase launched several USDC-related products last year, Incuit announced working with Circle to introduce low-cost programmable payments to tens of millions of its businesses and individual clients, and Polymarket completed a massive migration of USDC as a core settlement asset。

It's not that encrypted primary users are saving money for money. This is the traditional financial institution that embeds USDC into its own payment clearing line. The two examples correspond to a completely different valuation logic. The former followed the encryption cycle, while the latter followed the global volume of payments. The global cross-border payment market is about $1.5 trillion a year, and USDC is now trading 11.9 trillion a quarter, an increase of 247 per cent. The two figures cannot be directly compared, but the market began to price it with the second framework。

THE GENIUS ACT, AND A PURE TICKET

A STATEMENT ON X IS WIDELY CIRCULATED: "IF YOUR ARGUMENT IS A STABLE CURRENCY TO EAT GLOBAL PAYMENTS, CRCL IS THE MOST DIRECT BET. COIN IS A COMBINATION OF USDCS, WHICH ARE THE SUBJECT OF DIFFERENT TOOLS

This explains why the CRCL was able to walk out of a wave of situations when Coinbase stock prices crossed. Coinbase does exchanges, wallets, Base chains, corporate hosting, and USDC is one of many lines of business for it. Circe just do one thing, issue and circulate USDC. If you're going to bet the stable coin itself, there's only one pure mark on the market。

THIS LOGIC BECAME CLEARER AFTER THE GENIUS ACT WAS PASSED。

In July 2025, the bill landed and set up the first federal regulatory framework for the stabilization of currencies, requiring compliance issuers to hold 100 per cent of the cash or short-term national debt support reserves and undergo periodic audits. On the day of the adoption of the GENIUS Act, CRCL rose by 34 per cent on a single day. The market read the signal. It's not just good compliance, it's just supervision drawing a moat between USDC and USDT, a line that Tether can't cross in the short term。

This is confirmed by JP Morgan's data, which, after the adoption of the Act, stabilized the overall growth of the currency market by 19 per cent, USDC's share increased from 24 per cent at the beginning of the year to 25.5 per cent, and Tether fell from 67.5 per cent to 60.4 per cent. The number of transactions on the chain is more direct, and USDC is over USDT in Q4 and takes down about 50% of transactions on the stable currency chain, which is the first time that Tether has been caught up in this dimension in years。

But Tether didn't give up. Following the adoption of the GENIUS Act, Tether launched the USAT to pull up the Techorage Digital and Cantor Fitzgerald reserves, designed specifically for the GENIUS standard. CEO Bo Hines, leading USAT, was a former White House encryption consultant. USAT currently has approximately $20 million in circulation, almost negligible compared to $75.3 billion in USDC, but Tether has the world's largest network of stable currency users, Cantor Fitzgerald, which brings Wall Street relations, not a small combination。

At the same time, a group of names that had never appeared on the Stabilized Currency Drive also entered. Fidelity sent out FIDD, which operates on the Ether House, 100% of the GENIUS standard reserve, for institutions and retail. Robinhod and Revolut are reportedly developing their own stabilization currency. Morgan Chase, US Bancorp in the extended stabilization currency program. Stripe acquired Bridge and then embedded the stable currency clearing line into the $1.9 trillion annual payment flow. Secretary of the Treasury Bessent said that US currency markets could reach $3.7 trillion by the end of the decade. USDC's $75.3 billion now is less than 3% of that figure。

The GENIUS Act does not open the door of the Circle, but the entire traditional financial system. The first advantage is real: 30 block-chain support, Visa's deep binding with Morgan Chase, years of business API infrastructure, which is not something that new entrants can replicate in a year or two. Bernstein gave a target price of $190 on the grounds of controlling the barriers to competition in the moat and the technology dam。

But the depth of the moat, nobody knew the answer until the real stress test came. There is also little positive discussion in the circle of issues: there is a fixed term for the revenue-sharing contract for Circle and Coinbase, and Coinbase's leverage is no less than it is now in the next round, and USDC's holdings on its platform rose from 5 per cent in 2022 to 22 per cent today. The outcome of the negotiations will have a direct impact on how much Circle can actually retain from USDC growth。

Twenty-three billion dollars

Circe today's valuation comes in half from a story that hasn't happened yet。

Allaire spent a considerable amount of time talking about the payment needs of AI Agent at the press conference. AI Agent is required to make small, high-frequency, time-zone payments, call API, purchase power and complete cross-border settlement in the context of its autonomous mission. Allaire called this scene "the machine economy," arguing that when the number of AI Agents exceeds the number of human users, the main user of the payment infrastructure is no longer human, but machinery。

These needs are placed in the traditional payment system, each step of which is friction. Credit cards have operating time limits and artificial authorization links, and the minimum fee structure makes payments of less than US$ 0.01 economically impossible. Stripe ' s single minimum collection of $0.30 plus 2.9 per cent, cross-border charges for Visa and Mastercard average 1.5-3 per cent, and bank wire transfers do not work on weekends。

At the technical level, there are no such limitations, 24-hour uninterrupted, chain-to-closure, with a single cost of less than US$ 0.001 on a high-speed chain like Solana, and the Arc target is US$ 0.001. For this purpose, Circe has developed a payment infrastructure for AI Agent, and the Arc Test Network is online. This is not an improvement "a little cheaper" but a difference in the size of the overall cost structure。

The presentation of Benchmark-StoneX analyst Mark Palmer is straightforward, "AI Agent needs a programmable currency that can be directly embedded in software workflows, and there cannot be a long clearing window", and the infrastructure of the card organization is designed for human closure processes, not machines。

How real this need is can be seen in the speed of action at the level of the agreement。

Coinbase introduced the x402 protocol in May 2025, using the long-activated HTTP 402 status code to make automatic payments to AI Agent, allowing the server to request USDC payments directly before responding to a request, without the need for manual authorization. Five months later, over 100 million payments were processed. Google launched AP2 (Agent Payment Protocol), and OpenAI measured "Instant Checkout" in ChatGPT, with the settlement layer behind it being a combination of Stripe and stabilization currency tracks. These are not white papers, but infrastructure already operating in the production environment。

Visa's data give a sense size anchor. In November 2025, the monthly flow of Visa settled in stable currency was about $3.5 billion annually, and by January 2026 it had risen to $4.5 billion annually. Compared to Visa's total turnover of about $16 trillion a year, this figure is almost negligible. But the change of direction is more noteworthy than the absolute value, and Visa is expanding the pipeline herself. In early March, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the same judgment: "The number of AIAgents that start trading will soon exceed humans."。

The distance between narrative and reality is clear。

x402 The total trade volume over the past 30 days was $24 million, with 94,000 buyers and 22,000 sellers. The global electricity market is projected to be $6.88 trillion over the same period. McKinsey estimates that the real purpose of payments in the current stable currency is about $390 billion per year, of which B2B is about $226 billion, with even less retail. According to ECB data, organic retail transfers accounted for about 0.5 per cent of total stable currency flows。

Circle had a net shortfall of $7.0 million throughout 2025. Arc Main Network is planned to go online in 2026 and is still a testing network. AI and non-interest income combined over the year represented less than 5 per cent of the total。

Gartner predicts that the AI Agent economy will reach $30 trillion by 2030, and Bescent predicts that the stable currency market will reach $3.7 trillion by the end of the decade. If these figures are true, the current figure of $75.3 billion USDC flows is really just the starting point. But from $24 million x 402 months of trading to $30 trillion in the Agent economy, there's a road that nobody's ever walked。

The $23 billion in market value was betted on the road that it would be finished。

Circe came on the market in June of last year at $31, and in two weeks it went up to $299, then fell back to $50 and now double again. There's a question in this curve that's never really answered. What kind of company does it end up with

Is it an interest rate arbitrage, a compliance-stabilizing currency infrastructure, or an AI economy settlement? Allaire says, "You're seeing that decoupling," but decoupling is another problem。