Circle shares rose in premarket trading Wednesday after Q2 adjusted earnings beat Wall Street estimates, even as revenue landed just below forecasts. The stablecoin issuer also detailed rising USDC circulation and new Wall Street validators joining its Arc blockchain ahead of its Sept. 16 mainnet launch.
Circle Internet (CRCL) shares climbed in premarket trading Wednesday after the stablecoin issuer's Q2 adjusted earnings beat Wall Street expectations, even as revenue landed just below forecasts. The company posted adjusted earnings of 18 cents a share, ahead of the 16-cent consensus estimate, while revenue and reserve income climbed 7% year over year to $701 million, short of the $712 million analysts had projected. Net income from continuing operations reached $48 million, topping estimates of $43 million, and adjusted EBITDA rose 8% to $143 million.
Earnings beat offsets revenue miss
CoinDesk put the premarket gain at about 10%. Cointelegraph, citing Yahoo Finance data, measured the move at 5.7%, pushing shares above $66.5 — still down 20% year-to-date. Reserve income rose 5% to $668 million on a 25% rise in average USDC circulation, and net income marked a $530 million year-over-year increase.
USDC keeps growing as the stablecoin market cools
USDC circulation reached $73.3 billion at the end of June, up 19% from a year earlier, down from the token's 2026 peak of nearly $80 billion, while onchain volume surged 151% to $14.8 trillion. Yet the total stablecoin market's supply fell to $153 billion on June 30 from $156 billion on April 1, per CryptoQuant data cited by Cointelegraph, while rival Tether's USDT still leads with $183 billion in circulation. A spokesperson for institutional technology provider Talos told Cointelegraph: "USDC remains the dominant stablecoin for on-chain settlement, even as supply growth has stalled," adding that USDC drove 72% of the $15.6 trillion in adjusted onchain transfer volume, moving about eight times more volume per dollar of supply than USDT.
Arc blockchain draws Wall Street validators
Circle also detailed progress on Arc, its layer-1 blockchain network set to launch its public mainnet Sept. 16, with more than 100 ecosystem and institutional builders already building on it. Its founding validator set includes BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered, Galaxy, MoneyGram and other financial firms, and BlackRock plans to deploy its BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund on the network while DTCC works on infrastructure to tokenize securities held at its depository.
Momentum also built in the Circle Payments Network, which reached $14.7 billion in annualized transaction volume over the trailing 30 days, up 76% from the previous quarter, with 175 financial institutions now participating. It also recently secured OCC approval to establish Circle National Trust, giving it a federal trust bank charter. Management also raised its full-year guidance for other revenue, including Arc token presale revenue, to a range of $310 million to $330 million from $150 million to $170 million previously.
Sources: CoinDesk, Cointelegraph
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