Circle (CRCL) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

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DATE

Monday, May 11, 2026 at 8 a.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

- Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman — Jeremy Allaire

- Chief Financial Officer — Jeremy Fox-Geen

- Head of Strategic Finance — Scott Blair

- President — Heath Tarbert

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Full Conference Call Transcript

I'm Scott Blair, Circle's Head of Strategic Finance. I'm joined by Jeremy Allaire, our Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman; and Jeremy Fox-Geen, our Chief Financial Officer. Earlier this morning, we posted our earnings press release and earnings presentation on the Circle Investor Relations website, investor.circle.com. A transcript of this call will be posted on that website once available. I need to remind everyone that our earnings press release, presentation and this call contain statements that are forward-looking. Because forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified and some of which are beyond our control, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.

The events and circumstances reflected in our forward-looking statements may not be achieved or occur, and actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings. Additionally, nothing in this presentation constitutes as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities or an [ invitation ] or inducement to engage in investment activity. We will also disclose non-GAAP financial measures on this call today.

Definitions of those non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the earnings press release and earnings presentation, which are posted on Circle's Investor Relations website, investor.circle.com. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for GAAP measures. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jeremy Allaire.

Jeremy Allaire: Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone. I want to begin at a higher level and describe where I think we are and the guiding forces driving Circle's thinking and strategy. We believe we are going through the largest platform shift in the history of the Internet and it is accelerating. Specifically, this platform shift is the collision and compounding effect of new operating systems for intelligence and new operating systems for economic activity. These 2 major new technology infrastructures are converging into a new Internet stack that we believe will transform the global economic system over the coming decade.

Last quarter, we talked about the rise of AI agents and the Agentic economy and the need for these AI agents to operate on economic infrastructure that enables trusted value exchange and economic coordination. We also talked about the next generation of blockchains forming into economic OSs where value, identity, policy and contracts can execute and move across these new onchain computer networks. We are rapidly moving into a world in which AI-powered software machines, coordinating on blockchain computers, deliver an increasing share of global economic activity. This is a profound shift and one that is highly aligned with Circle's fundamental vision, mission and strategy.

We are building a leadership position in this new era from a position of considerable strength. Over the past several years, we have built out a broad-based Internet financial platform that compounds through several reinforcing flywheels. Each pillar of Circle's platform is self-reinforcing. Our digital assets flywheel, encompassing our stablecoin network and core digital assets drives increasing liquidity, utility and developer integrations, which in turn continues to grow the value of the network. The Arc network or what we call Arc is entirely built on network flywheels and grows as more apps are launched, more assets are issued and as liquidity and distribution flow through our interoperability infrastructure.

These flywheels accrue to Arc network stakeholders, but also reinforce and help grow Circle's other platform pillars. Both of these, in turn, grow the flywheels for our own apps, together, Circle's apps, including CPN and Circle Mint continue to drive more use cases, greater transaction volume, user growth and distribution. Our apps are anchored in Circle's digital asset network and are being built natively on Arc. These flywheels work together to create one of the most compelling Internet financial platforms in the world, and now we are layering across this entire platform, the deep product and technology capabilities to compound alongside AI and Agentic economic growth. Now turning to the quarter. I want to focus on a few key highlights.

First, we ended the quarter with $77 billion of USDC in circulation, representing 28% year-over-year growth. Alongside USDC supply growth, we also saw enormous growth in transaction activity with onchain transaction volume up 263% to $21.5 trillion. Total revenue and reserve income of $694 million, grew 20% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA grew to $151 million, 24% year-over-year growth and we continue to maintain a strong adjusted EBITDA margin of 53%. We've also had a number of major platform and product launches recently, including today's launch of our new Circle Agent stack, which I'll discuss in greater detail shortly.

We launched CPN managed payments, which brings the power of CPN to banks, financial institutions and payment service providers in a turnkey fashion and we continue to see robust growth in CPN volumes and financial institution adoption while also seeing many more mainstream USDC launches and integrations. Finally, the Arc network is getting ready for lift off. We have had a highly successful test net. And today, we announced the presale of the Arc token, raising $222 million at a $3 billion fully diluted network value with lead investor A16Z crypto alongside a range of other outstanding strategic partners. Turning to our stablecoin network and digital assets growth and adoption.

We continue to see very strong enterprise and use case expansion. Meta the world's most preeminent social platform began using USDC for creator payouts. This is significant because just last year, there was a view that big tech companies would introduce their own stablecoins. We've been very clear that the network effects, liquidity and global reach of our network, along with sound regulation make USDC the preferred option for major enterprises integrating this technology and that it makes little sense for these companies to go it alone. Meta is demonstrating exactly that. We're seeing this across the board. DoorDash paying out USDC, the drivers and other global enterprises embracing USDC in their payment flows.

Polymarket adopting USDC for funding and settlement on their leading prediction market. Innovative financial institutions like Arbor Bank using USDC to power 24/7 banking and expanded relationships with leading exchanges, including the top exchanges in Korea, a thriving market with significant growth opportunities for USDC. In capital markets, we're continuing to see strong expansion. Circle is participating in a DTCC test run of Tokenized Securities Trading and we're seeing emerging traction with USDC as collateral on regulated derivatives exchanges. In the traditional enterprise space, treasury management applications are really taking hold.

We recently announced a broad partnership with [ Tyriba ], one of the leading treasury management platforms, serving thousands of enterprises and many Fortune 100 companies to make USDC payment flows a seamless part of their solution, Ramp one of the fastest-growing fintechs in enterprise treasury and payments is adopting USDC for a wide range of international and domestic use cases and cross-border and treasury flows are increasingly moving to USDC across leading banks, fintechs and even the start-up ecosystem with wide combinator driving funding operations in UDC. The use cases are expanding, and this is driving further flywheels. While the stablecoin market itself was relatively flat in the quarter, it grew 32% year-over-year.

More importantly, stablecoin transaction volumes continued to grow. According to Visa's reported figures on commercial transaction volume, USDC continued to gain market share and now accounts for 63% of all stablecoin transactions. Looking more broadly at onchain volume. USDC transaction volume grew over 260% year-over-year to $21.5 trillion in the quarter. Other third-party data sources, which include Solana transaction volume, put USDC's volumes at nearly $30 trillion in the quarter, with our market share at approximately 80% of all onchain transaction volume. I want to underscore an important point. USDC is the most widely transacted and used dollar digital currency in the world. No dollar digital currency is achieving anywhere near the volume of onchain transactions as USDC.

And as this market accelerates, we believe this leadership position and the network effects that flow from it will continue to compound to Circle. We also remain the most liquid and available digital dollar in the world, having minted and redeemed nearly $150 billion of USDC in Q1 alone, providing reliable and compliant digital dollar dial tone through our global liquidity network all around the world. Alongside USDC's growth, we are seeing strong growth from our other digital assets, EURC, which has long been the world's largest euro stable point, grew 2x year-over-year, ending the period at EUR 358 million. Our tokened money market fund, USYC, grew over 300% year-over-year.

And as of May 7, stands at over $3 billion in assets. Circle's USYC is now the largest tokenized money market fund in the world and a key building block for collateral and digital asset trading markets. We are also expanding our digital assets portfolio. We recently announced the planned introduction of a new Bitcoin product from Circle, SERBTC which pending official launch would provide a compliant and secure wrapped version of Bitcoin that will be issued by Circle on both the Ethereum and Arc networks. We see a significant opportunity for programmable onchain primitives for Bitcoin from Circle. As I mentioned in my opening, Arc is getting ready for lift-off with the ArcMainNet launch coming soon.

Arc has been designed with a broad group of incredible partners from across the financial system. We have built what we believe will be one of the most institutionally ready networks in the world, a network that will be operated by leading financial institutions with the trust required for global economic infrastructure. We are bringing powerful interoperability infrastructure to the network and we have optimized Arc for asset issuers, payment terms and capital markets applications. Arc comes with purpose-built features that simplify how stablecoins and tokenized assets bring the financial system and financial services onto these new operating systems.

And everything has been designed from day 1 with AI and Agentic flows in mind, from developer tooling to new services on Arc built entirely for AI agents. Arc is not just our core layer 1. At launch, Arc will support a suite of assets and protocols from Circle and third parties. We are bringing incremental services to make these accessible and ready and providing a comprehensive set of developer tools, and bundled applications from Circle to deliver meaningful value to Arc users on day 1. Our Testnet has performed very well. Users are transacting at scale.

Arc has a vibrant and growing developer community building on the platform and I believe we and the entire ecosystem are prepared as we approach MainNet launch. I want to focus on one of the most significant components of our strategy with Arc and more broadly for Circle. We are becoming the leading interoperability platform in the entire blockchain ecosystem. As you can see [Audio Gap] we've continued to scale the cross-team transfer protocol, reaching almost $50 billion of volume in Q1, representing 3x strategic customer capability with Arc. We've announced that we're opening up CCTP to other asset issuers. We build the highways for USDC, and now we're opening them to other stablecoin and real-world asset issuers.

Anyone doing tokenization can get the same interoperability, safe transport and distribution that we've already built around the world across all these blockchain networks. We're also turning on seamless bridges for end users and enabling flows of leading assets from other chains with a new canonical bridge from Circle. This infrastructure with safety, trust and monetization options available to both Circle and third parties that use them is a pillar capability of Arc and Circle's platform more broadly. And this is coming at a very important time as recent hacks put into question the safety and reliability of some of our competitor networks.

And our focus on foundational security was further reinforced with our post-quantum readiness road map announcement, including that transaction messages on Arc will be post quantum secure on day 1. On our path to building Arc, we are excited to announce today that Circle has undertaken a presale of the Arc token. Alongside the presale, we have released the Arc token white paper available today on the Arc website. The Arc token will help to bootstrap and scale the network by aligning participants, including Circle with the long-term success of the network and enabling governance, staking in security and other protocol functions across the network.

This is about building a new economic OS with broad-based stakeholders across the global financial and developer ecosystem. That means that every app builder, every end user and every institution building and operating on the network can become a stakeholder and ultimately participate in governance. Our Arc token presale was led by A16Z crypto and includes some of the world's largest asset managers, including Apollo Funds, Arc Invest, BlackRock, Janus Henderson Investors, exchange, fintech and capital markets firms such as Bullish, Intercontinental Exchange, Marshall Waste and SBI Group and leading global banks such as Standard Charted Ventures as well as venture firms, including general catalyst, Hahn Ventures and IDG Capital.

As I noted at the outset, Arc is built as an economic OS that anticipates this convergence with AI operating systems, and we are accelerating our product investments in this space, both on top of Arc and by building on the wide range of applications and integrations that already exist for USDC. Today, we are rolling out key parts of the Circle Agent