Circle Internet Group, Inc.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced the DTCC tokenization service on May 4, 2026, a platform designed to bring Russell 1000 components, ETFs, and US Treasuries onto distributed ledgers. With over 50 firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Circle, Ondo, and Nasdaq participating, the service moved into limited production in July 2026 following a December 2025 SEC No-Action Letter. DTCC CEO Frank La Salla said tokenization will significantly change how markets operate by bringing new levels of liquidity, transparency, and efficiency to investors, while Brian Steele of the DTCC added that the service is designed to provide systemic scale where deep liquidity already lives. The infrastructure shift extends beyond the DTCC: Nasdaq secured SEC approval on March 18, 2026, under Release 34-105047, to facilitate tokenized settlement on the same order book, ticker, and CUSIP as traditional assets, NYSE Arca followed with rule change SR-NYSEARCA-2026-45 effective April 29, 2026, and the broader NYSE received approval for its own related filings on April 17, 2026. The SEC issued a five-year conditional innovation exemption on September 17, 2026, specifically for tokenized NMS stocks, while the CFTC clarified through Staff Letter 25-39 and an updated FAQ on September 24, 2026, that tokenized collateral may be used for derivatives margin. The tokenized asset market tracked by rwa.xyz stood at approximately $38.6 billion as of late September 2026, up from $2 billion in 2022, with tokenized Treasuries accounting for $14.7 billion to $15.65 billion of that total, led by BlackRock's BUIDL at $2.70 billion, Circle's USYC at $2.60 billion, and Ondo's USDY at $2.23 billion. A June 1, 2026, Citi report estimates a base case of $5.5 trillion in tokenized assets and $1.9 trillion in stablecoins by 2030, though it warns of a messy period in which tokenized and legacy systems operate side by side.

Ripple added $765 million to the stablecoin market cap in the recently concluded Q3 2026, trailing only Circle among issuers. The RWA Foundation X account shared information on the growth of the stablecoin market cap in the recently concluded Q3 2026. Ripple's gain placed it second, behind Circle, in the quarter's stablecoin market cap expansion.

Circle Internet Group has secured a $100 million strategic equity investment from Binance alongside a new five-year commercial agreement aimed at expanding USDC access across emerging markets. The investment was made through a private placement of Circle Class A common stock at a price reflecting a 5% discount to CRCL's market price before closing, and Binance has agreed not to transfer the shares for up to two years from the closing date, subject to customary exceptions. Under the agreement, Binance will accelerate USDC promotion, awareness and integration on its platform, while Circle will provide infrastructure for holding and using the stablecoin. The deal comes as Circle's USDC business continues to expand, with USDC ending the second quarter of 2026 with $73.3 billion in circulation, up 19% year over year, while quarterly on-chain transaction volume reached $14.8 trillion, surged 151%, and Circle posted $701 million in revenues and reserve income, up 7%. Circle has also been widening its institutional partnerships, with BNY adding USDC minting and redemption to its Digital Asset Custody platform, Standard Chartered launching bank-led access to USDC minting and redemption for institutional clients, Nium connecting USDC settlement to its payout network spanning more than 190 countries, and JCB beginning work with Circle on cross-border treasury transfers and stablecoin payment experiences in Japan. Circle is also expanding the ecosystem around its Arc blockchain, where BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized liquidity fund is expected to deploy and DTCC is expected to enable the tokenization of DTC-custodied assets, while Circle Payments Network reached $14.7 billion in annualized transaction volume at the end of the second quarter, up 76% sequentially, with 175 financial institutions enrolled.

Bitcoin ETFs took in $1.7 billion in inflows over a strong two-day run, with $714.7 million arriving on Tuesday after Monday's roughly $1 billion haul, the ninth biggest inflow day ever, bringing the four-day streak to about $2.3 billion. In the stablecoin world, Mastercard and SoFi have teamed up on stablecoin settlement for cards, with SoFi now settling debit and credit card transactions across Mastercard's network using SoFi USD and migrating its entire credit card program, which is expected to process more than $25 billion in annualized volume. Binance has invested $100 million into Circle, buying shares at a 5% discount on a vesting schedule, and signed a new five-year commercial agreement to promote USDC on its platform. Binance is also under US scrutiny over possible Iran sanctions violations, according to Bloomberg News. BitMEX, the exchange that invented the perpetual swap, has now closed.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, said in a recent research piece titled The Machine-Native Economy that the widespread adoption and use of AI could be an overlooked and undervalued source of demand for digital assets. The research said that the growth of AI and machine-to-machine payments could increase demand for blockchain, programmable payment infrastructure, stablecoins, and various types of on-chain assets, and it sees opportunities for digital assets to support compute markets, opening the way for claims on processing power to be tokenized, traded, and used as collateral. The research authors, Will Su, Robert Mitchnick, Jay Jacobs, and William Helm, said these developments position AI as a structural catalyst for digital asset adoption and place digital assets as a potential enabler of the AI economy. This relationship remains undervalued and could expand the role of digital assets as core infrastructure for an increasingly autonomous digital economy, they said. The research also noted that stablecoins are likely to lead adoption for high-frequency, sub-cent machine-to-machine transactions that operate around the clock, echoing comments from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who affirmed in July that AI agents will further drive demand for crypto-based financial services. Crypto firms are racing to build supporting tools, such as Coinbase's x402 protocol, Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol, Circle's agent wallets and USDC payment tools launched in May, and OKX's Agent Payments Protocol.

Circle announced on September 21 that it has launched a feature on its institutional service Circle Mint that allows users to borrow USD Coin (USDC) using Bitcoin (BTC) as collateral. The new feature, called Digital Asset-Backed Borrowing (DABB), supports Arc and Ethereum. Customers deposit Bitcoin, issue a one-to-one backed Circle Wrapped Bitcoin (cirBTC), provide it as collateral to third-party lending markets, and receive the borrowed USDC in their Circle Mint balance. Borrowing is overcollateralized, and at launch it supports markets on the third-party lending protocol Morpho, with Circle planning to add more supported lending markets and networks going forward. Borrowing rates, required collateral ratios, liquidation thresholds, and liquidity vary depending on the market used, and collateral may be liquidated if its value declines.

Visa has joined the founding validator cohort for Circle's Arc L1 blockchain, moving the payments giant from routing stablecoin traffic to helping secure the network itself. The cohort includes BlackRock, DTCC, Mastercard, and ICE. Visa's stablecoin settlement volume rose from a $3.5 billion annualized run rate in November 2025 to $7 billion by April 2026 and to an annualized $20 billion by September, a 15x year-over-year increase. Visa runs a dual-chain strategy: Solana remains the primary venue for production settlement with partners Cross River Bank and Lead Bank on a seven-day cycle, while Arc L1, which launched its mainnet on September 16, 2026, is a permissioned, USDC-native environment built for financial markets and agentic AI economic activity. Rubail Birwadker, Visa's Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships, said Arc represents the compliant, high-trust network infrastructure needed to support onchain payments growth, and Circle Chief Product and Technology Officer Nikhil Chandhok said the work reflects growing demand for USDC and settlement infrastructure. The build-out comes ahead of the GENIUS Act enforcement cliff on January 18, 2027, after federal agencies missed the July 2026 rulemaking deadline, and as Visa expands to over 160 card programs in more than 50 countries.

Bitcoin broke above $84,000 for the first time in eight months early on Monday, rising 4.87% to $84,194.91, even after the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act failed its procedural Senate vote last week. The bill fell short of the required 60 votes after Senate Democrats blocked its advancement over lingering concerns about government ethics provisions and presidential conflicts of interest, with a handful of Republican defections further crippling its momentum following intense lobbying from community banks over stablecoin reward rules. Among the biggest pre-market movers in the crypto patch were Strategy, Coinbase, Circle, and Robinhood. Strategy CEO and bitcoin bull Michael Saylor said in an X post that the rejection of CLARITY marks a positive inflexion point for digital assets.

Circle Internet Group has switched on the public mainnet for Arc, a Layer 1 blockchain built for financial markets, real time payments, and AI driven economic activity, with USDC integrated at the protocol level. The rollout arrives with a validator group drawn from large financial institutions, support for USDC, EURC, and tokenized funds, and more than 100 applications and ecosystem partners already connected to Arc's infrastructure. Circle Internet Group last closed at $91.78, while the most followed narrative framework pegs fair value closer to $103.55, implying the stock is 11% undervalued. That fair value estimate uses a discount rate of 8.56% and assumes that by 2029 Circle Internet Group could be earning $723.7 million on revenue of $5.3b, with the stock trading on a P/E of 56.9x on those earnings, against a current analyst price target of $104.28. Estimates behind that single fair value number diverge widely, with 2029 earnings estimates spanning from $356.6 million to $874.2 million and price targets running from $37.00 to $243.00. The stock trades on 51.6x earnings compared with 29.5x for the wider US Software group and a fair ratio of 51.7x.

Circle Internet Group launched Arc, a purpose-built open Layer 1 blockchain for financial markets, as its public mainnet. The network integrates Circle's USDC and EURC stablecoins for payments, FX, trading, lending, and asset issuance with dollar-denominated gas fees, and is backed by an institutional validator set that includes BlackRock, DTCC, Mastercard, and Visa. More than 100 ecosystem partners, including banks, payment networks, asset managers, custodians, DeFi protocols, and wallets, are participating at launch. Arc pulls several existing Circle products into one stack, from USDC and EURC to Circle Payments Network and StableFX, so the group now also operates the transaction layer where those tokens move, trade and settle. Circle Internet Group has a US$21.6b market cap and a software industry classification.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has granted temporary, conditional relief allowing Tokenized Securities Venues to trade certain tokenized National Market System stocks through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools, opening a limited path for tokenized U.S. stock trading. The move follows the Senate's failure on September 15 to advance the CLARITY Act, when a procedural vote failed 49-50, short of the 60 votes required. The exemption is deliberately narrow: tokenized shares must carry the same basic rights as the corresponding traditional stock, including dividend and voting rights, and issuers must be given an opportunity to object before an unaffiliated third party begins trading a tokenized version of their shares. Trading will also face limits on symbols and volume, participating venues must meet access, transparency and other investor-protection requirements, and the relief expires five years after publication unless the regulatory framework changes before then. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins described the move as a step toward bringing U.S. capital markets on-chain while the agency evaluates longer-term rules, and Robinhood jumped more than 5% in early trading, while Coinbase, Circle, Bullish and Securitize also gained.

Circle, the major US stablecoin issuer, announced on September 16 that it has launched the mainnet of Arc, its underlying layer-1 blockchain. Arc is designed so that transaction processing fees are paid in the dollar-denominated stablecoin USDC, with settlements finalized in under one second, and it also offers security features for institutional investors such as confidential transactions and quantum-resistant signatures. The founding validators that approve transactions include 11 companies, among them BlackRock, the US DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, SBI Group, and Sumitomo Corporation. Arc is linked to StableFX, a foreign exchange platform that exchanges multiple currencies around the clock, and JPYC, the company issuing the Japanese yen stablecoin JPYC, is also listed as a participating partner currency. By the 16th, Circle had completed the issuance of an initial supply of 10 billion of its own token, ARC, and aims to migrate to proof of stake around 2027, saying it is the world's first listed company to issue its own token on a new layer-1.

Carolyn Wilkins, an external member of the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee, said in a speech at Queen's University Belfast on September 15 that the rise of stablecoins could reinforce the global dominance of the US dollar and increase demand for US Treasuries. She noted that dollar-denominated stablecoins facilitate cross-border payments and broaden access to dollar assets outside the United States, saying dollar-denominated coins account for about 98% of the stablecoin market and that the dollar enjoys a substantial first-mover advantage. According to data she cited, Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC held about 150 billion dollars' worth of US short-term government debt as of the end of 2025, having added roughly 33 billion dollars' worth during that year. At the same time, she argued that this relationship is a double-edged sword, warning that once issuance becomes large enough, a wave of redemptions could force issuers to sell short-term government debt, potentially amplifying volatility in a market that is already under stress. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority published final rules for stablecoin issuers in June after trials in a regulatory sandbox, and the Bank of England has indicated it will allow systemic issuers to hold up to 70% of their backing assets in UK government debt with less than six months to maturity.

Circle has officially announced that it will launch the Arc mainnet on September 16, with the market watching to see whether meme coins will boom in the footsteps of Robinhood Chain. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has rebounded back above $77,800 and is trading in a range of $76,636 to $79,600, amid a revival in the crypto market and trading volume. Investors are also keeping an eye on the CLARITY Act draft and the Fed meeting, viewing the key resistance level at $80,000, which the price has not yet been able to break above.

Crypto markets gained on Monday as optimism over a key US crypto bill revived risk appetite across the digital-asset spectrum. The rally came as the odds of the market regulation Clarity Act passing this year climbed from as low as around 14% to near 30% on Polymarket, still a long shot but a sharp repricing of its prospects. Bitcoin, which accounts for around 60% of the market value of all cryptocurrencies, again approached the $80,000 price level, increasing as much as 1.5% to $78,452. Shares of crypto-related companies rallied more, with digital exchange Coinbase Global Inc. jumping as much as 8% and stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group Inc. increasing as much as 6.4%. Senators have promised to kick off procedural votes later this week, and ahead of that Republican senators released a final draft of the bill with changes addressing some of its most contentious points, including giving the Treasury Secretary power to intervene if deposit flight became detrimental to community banks and adding new ethics guard rails that would force the president to divest from virtual assets or place significant holdings in a blind trust. Analysts at Clear Street wrote in a report Monday that they believe the ethics compromise is the most important single change, since it was the primary Democratic sticking point, calling it incrementally positive for Coinbase, Circle and Bullish.

Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin is regulated at the state trust tier through a New York Department of Financial Services limited-purpose trust charter with segregated reserves and monthly independent CPA attestation, while its Office of the Comptroller of the Currency national trust charter, received in December 2025, remains only conditionally approved. That places RLUSD stronger than Tether, which holds no US charter and operates from El Salvador with no US resolution authority, but weaker than Circle's USDC, which received full unconditional OCC approval on July 10, 2026, and added a NYDFS trust charter three weeks later, making it the only dollar stablecoin holding both the state and federal tiers. RLUSD supply has crossed $2 billion, with $810 million on the XRP Ledger against $756 million on Ethereum, and Ripple pairs the coin with BNY Mellon as reserve custodian. A 21-bank consortium stablecoin planned for the first half of 2027 would launch with prudential supervision already attached, giving Ripple a little over a year to convert its conditional charter before the field gets more crowded. Until the OCC lifts the conditions, which typically requires satisfying capital, governance, and operational commitments, RLUSD remains a state-regulated stablecoin with a federal charter in progress.

MoneyGram has launched a stablecoin-backed card that lets users hold a U.S. dollar-denominated balance and spend it anywhere Visa is accepted. The new MoneyGram Card is initially available only in Colombia, with plans to expand to other markets in the coming months. Consumers can sign up through MoneyGram's app and use the card for online and in-store purchases, and can also send money to themselves for cash pickup at MoneyGram locations. The card runs on Visa's global payments network and uses Circle Internet Group's USDC stablecoin, and MoneyGram said it plans to eventually make its own MGUSD token available with the card as well. MoneyGram added that it plans to introduce a physical version of the card later this year that will support withdrawals at ATM bank machines. The launch comes as stablecoin trading volumes surpassed $1.1 billion U.S. in August, according to Payment Scan. MoneyGram is no longer publicly traded, having been acquired by private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners in 2023 for $1.8 billion U.S.

Circle has agreed to acquire Singapore-based cross-border payments platform Tazapay for approximately $400 million, a deal that expands its global payments infrastructure and strengthens its position in the stablecoin race. Tazapay processes over $25 billion in annualized payment volume, with about 60% already involving stablecoins, and brings more than 60 banking and fintech partners plus local payout capabilities across over 100 markets. The transaction, expected to close in 2027, is subject to regulatory approval from authorities including the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Circle, which issues USDC, aims to use Tazapay's connections to move digital dollars into local bank accounts worldwide, powering ordinary international commerce.