went public in June 2025 at $31, ran to nearly $300 that same June, and now trades near $62, down close to 80% from the peak. The reflex read is that the market soured on stablecoins. It didn’t. supply is still near $73 billion, still about two-thirds of real stablecoin volume, and analysts still carry an average price target near $120, roughly double where the stock changes hands.
The demand underneath is not tracking crypto’s mood, either. Sami Start, who co-founded the fiat-to-stablecoin onramp Transak and watches the money move across hundreds of apps, described the split to the On The Margin podcast:
“The total addressable market is much larger in the stablecoin side than the crypto side now. Actually, there’s somewhat of a crypto winter happening in terms of just retail buying and selling of crypto. But the stablecoin adoption is orthogonal to that, and institutions are just adopting stablecoins for real-world use cases at the moment, and that’s why we’re seeing it grow.”
What Actually Got Repriced
The problem is the business wrapped around the coin. Circle keeps interest on its reserves and hands a large share to whoever gets USDC into users’ hands. The biggest of those distributors is , which took $908 million from Circle in 2024, more than half its revenue. When Coinbase threw in behind a rival stablecoin in late June, Circle dropped about 17% in a single session, and the deal comes up for renewal on August 18.
Why is that toll so hard to avoid? Raj Kamal, who runs the Dubai cross-border firm TransFi, walked through what happens when a worker in the US sends money home to Manila:
“There is a recipient bank, which is receiving money from the sender’s card or bank account. Money is being sent to a Circle bank account, from where minting is done and that converts to USDC. USDC most likely will find it tough to be off-ramped in the Philippines, because the cost of doing USDC off-ramp there would be higher. So you would convert that USDC on-chain to USDT.”
Circle sits at the mint. Everything downstream is distribution it has to pay for. And Kamal thinks the whole thing has barely begun:
“Stablecoins are just about starting. We’re just scratching at the surface of what is possible, because compared to traditional payments, stablecoins do much little volumes. If the entire world was operating in US dollar stablecoins, USDC, USDT, then the problem is solved. But that’s not what the reality is.”
The Bull Case Is a Distribution Case
So the stock comes down to one question: can USDC reach more hands without Circle paying a Coinbase-sized toll at every door? That is what a spreading layer of apps does. Rizon says it passed a quarter of a million users in more than 120 countries in year one and moved north of $100 million, unaudited company figures. Survila says the reach is only possible because of the rails underneath:
“We went live in 122 countries almost immediately. That’s only possible because of the stablecoin infrastructure. Revolut is active in maybe 47 countries.”
And the growth is unglamorous, which is the tell that it’s real. Ask Sami Start why Transak’s numbers keep climbing and he doesn’t reach for a vision:
“The very boring truth is that the amount of volume and revenue that we see is pretty much just correlated by the GDP of that country.”
It is not all upside, and the sharpest skeptic sits inside the industry. Neo, who runs the onchain neobank UR, thinks most of these apps are thinner than they claim:
“Everyone’s taking the easy way out in Web3, Web2 world today. Easy USDC stablecoins, you issue a card, suddenly you’re a neobank and you can spend, and it’s very cool. But structurally at its core, nothing’s really changing.”
He is probably right about the apps. For Circle it barely matters. A shallow neobank and a serious one do it the same favor: they pull USDC into circulation through a door that isn’t Coinbase.
Then There Is the Question
Every few weeks someone declares stablecoins the end of the card networks. Start, who watches the flows from the onramp, sees something slower and less dramatic:
“I believe that the casino and speculation side of crypto is taking less of the limelight now, and more of the focus is going onto blockchain as an infrastructure.”
That is the shift Circle is betting on, and the card networks are betting on it too. The $33 trillion figure everyone quotes for stablecoin volume is mostly bots once you strip the wash trading out. Visa’s own analysts put real volume closer to $9 to $11 trillion, still under the $14.2 trillion Visa settles by itself. And rather than get cut out, is paying up to $1.8 billion for the stablecoin firm BVNK and Stripe bought Bridge outright for $1.1 billion. Investing.com laid out the fuller version of how these coins are becoming the world’s payment rails.
The Bottom Line
So none of it rests on Rizon, or TransFi, or any single app. The Circle trade is whether the distribution widens fast enough that the company’s cut of a growing market outruns what it pays to reach that market. What no chart settles yet is how much of it Circle keeps. I asked Survila where all this ends up, and he didn’t reach for a number:
“Global domination. The banking will change completely. The idea that people get different access just because they were born in a certain place, that’s going to be non-existent.”
Maybe. The Coinbase renewal on August 18 will have something more specific to say.
