What Circle’s IPO Means for Crypto Investors

Circle’s IPO reminds us why crypto investors can benefit from exposure to both crypto assets and crypto-related stocks.

Circle, the creator of the world’s second-largest stablecoin (USDC), went public last Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CRCL. 

It was one of the most successful IPOs in recent memory.

The offering was 25x oversubscribed, meaning institutional investors asked to buy 25 times more CRCL stock than the company wanted to sell. The deal was priced at $31/share, above the $25-$27 share price range indicated in the offering document. And once the stock started trading, oh la la: Shares closed their first day up 167% on high volume, and continued higher since. As I write this on Tuesday, they’re trading at $105.

Investors want CRLC exposure. And who can blame them?

Stablecoins have emerged as crypto’s second killer app, after bitcoin. Over the past five years, stablecoin AUM has grown from just over $4 billion to $250 billion, and the U.S. Treasury Department projects they could top $2 trillion by 2030. It’s hard to find another industry where the government’s base case is 700% growth in the next five years.

Stablecoin Market Capitalization

Source: Bitwise Asset Management with data from The Block and DeFi Llama. Data from January 1, 2020 to June 10, 2025.

Stablecoin issuers like Circle sit at the center of this ecosystem. They take in dollars from investors, and in exchange they issue digital tokens (“stablecoins”) representing those dollars. They invest the original dollars in U.S. Treasuries and promise investors they can convert stablecoins to traditional dollars at any time on a one-for-one basis. They make money by taking the interest income from the Treasuries; stablecoins do not pay a yield.

It’s a simple business, but a good one. With short-term Treasury rates around 4%, stablecoins today generate around $10 billion in high-margin revenue for issuers. If stablecoin AUM grows to $2 trillion, that will turn into $80 billion/year.

But this isn’t a memo to laud Circle’s business model, or its economic prospects, as good as I think they are.

I want to make a bigger point.

Building a Complete Crypto Portfolio

Once you move beyond bitcoin, one of the oldest—and most important—debates in crypto is this: Where will the value accrue? Will it concentrate at the base layer, in assets like Ethereum and Solana, which provide the core infrastructure of the decentralized economy? Or will it live further up the stack, among the applications that use this infrastructure to build revenue-generating products? Think of projects like Uniswap or Polymarket.

Circle is a classic application play. It leverages the infrastructure of public blockchains, but it only pays a small fee for the privilege. Put differently, Circle can issue a stablecoin on Ethereum for fractions of a penny, but it is immediately accessible by hundreds of millions of people in nearly every country in the world; can be transferred anywhere in the world almost instantly at very low cost; can be used in DeFi applications; can be programmed through smart contracts; and so on.

Just as, thirty years ago, the internet opened up content production on a global scale—suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could publish content that could be read by anyone in the world, instantly—public blockchains do the same for finance. It’s software anyone can build on.

It’s not just Circle and stablecoins, of course. There are a growing number of publicly traded crypto equities that leverage blockchain rails to build new types of businesses. Coinbase, for example, takes in significant revenue from its Layer-2 Base network, which sits on top of Ethereum. Galaxy, known for crypto trading, may generate somewhere close to $100 million in staking revenue per year. Mastercard runs a platform that integrates with blockchains such as Ethereum and Avalanche to help businesses borrow, lend, and make cross-border payments more efficiently. And so on.

All of this is to say, we believe many parts of the crypto ecosystem will thrive over the long term in a symbiotic way. The core infrastructure will grow more valuable as more applications use it, and the applications will become valuable as the infrastructure continuously improves.

Of course, it’s impossible to know whether more value will accrue to the blockchains themselves or the companies that are building on them.

It’s why I think the best way forward is to own them both.

Risks and Important Information

No Advice on Investment; Risk of Loss: Prior to making any investment decision, each investor must undertake its own independent examination and investigation, including the merits and risks involved in an investment, and must base its investment decision—including a determination whether the investment would be a suitable investment for the investor—on such examination and investigation.

Crypto assets are digital representations of value that function as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, or a store of value, but they do not have legal tender status. Crypto assets are sometimes exchanged for U.S. dollars or other currencies around the world, but they are not currently backed nor supported by any government or central bank. Their value is completely derived by market forces of supply and demand, and they are more volatile than traditional currencies, stocks, or bonds.

Trading in crypto assets comes with significant risks, including volatile market price swings or flash crashes, market manipulation, and cybersecurity risks and risk of losing principal or all of your investment. In addition, crypto asset markets and exchanges are not regulated with the same controls or customer protections available in equity, option, futures, or foreign exchange investing.

Crypto asset trading requires knowledge of crypto asset markets. In attempting to profit through crypto asset trading, you must compete with traders worldwide. You should have appropriate knowledge and experience before engaging in substantial crypto asset trading. Crypto asset trading can lead to large and immediate financial losses. Under certain market conditions, you may find it difficult or impossible to liquidate a position quickly at a reasonable price.

The opinions expressed represent an assessment of the market environment at a specific time and are not intended to be a forecast of future events, or a guarantee of future results, and are subject to further discussion, completion and amendment. The information herein is not intended to provide, and should not be relied upon for, accounting, legal or tax advice, or investment recommendations. You should consult your accounting, legal, tax or other advisors about the matters discussed herein.