作者：TVBee

I said I’d study a single stock, and it turns out it’s still crypto-related — Circle ( $CRCL ). But really, this is a project straddling Web2 and Web3.

┈➤Business

╰✦Web3: The top stablecoin for secondary markets and DeFi

USDC is both the base currency for trading pairs on secondary markets and the number one stablecoin in the DeFi ecosystem.

According to DefiLlama data, USDC’s DeFi TVL is $11.456 billion, far exceeding USDT’s $8.714 billion.

╰✦Web2: Payments

In e-commerce, Stripe allows users to pay with USDC while merchants ultimately receive USD.

Visa does the opposite: consumers spend fiat, and USDC can be used for settlement between the card issuer and the merchant’s acquiring bank via Visa.

╰✦AI Agent Payments

As the main payment standard for the X402 protocol, USDC is integrating into Web2 through AI agents.

┈➤Revenue

Circle’s revenue is tightly linked to the crypto market and Web3 payments on one side, and closely tied to macro conditions on the other.

According to the Q1 2026 earnings report, 94% of Circle’s revenue comes from reserve income — that is, the asset reserves backing or collateralizing the issued USDC.

It’s mainly two parts: interest on dollar deposits, and yield from holding U.S. Treasuries.

So as USDC’s scale grows, Circle’s reserve assets grow, and corresponding revenue increases.

Meanwhile, Federal Reserve policy and even the broader macroeconomy directly or indirectly affect dollar deposit rates and Treasury yields, thereby influencing USDC reserve income.

So Circle’s revenue is simultaneously shaped by Web3, stablecoin payments, the AI industry, and macro factors.

┈➤Growth

╰✦US stock trading on Binance and others may boost USDC demand

Beyond crypto, US stock secondary markets on CEXs also need USDC.

Binance officially launched US stock trading this month, and it is USDC‑based. Other stablecoins are supported too, but they are converted into USDC for trading.

And when selling US stocks, you receive USDC.

So Binance’s stock trading is quite likely to increase USDC demand — after all, Binance has huge market volume.

╰✦Latter half of the bear market may increase stablecoin demand

From last October until now, the crypto bear market has been dragging on for eight months. We’re probably entering the latter half of the crypto cycle, a phase that drives demand for stablecoins.

Exchanges need to hold stablecoins to buy BTC or other cryptocurrencies when the timing is right.

In both 2018 and 2022, USDT market cap grew in the period just before the final leg down.

USDC’s market cap shrank in 2022 because of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in March 2022, which indirectly caused USDC to briefly depeg. There’s been no similar event this year, so secondary market demand for USDC could increase.

╰✦Payments may increase USDC holdings

Earlier analysis of #Paypal’s stablecoin PYUSD showed it’s the fastest-growing stablecoin, clearly demonstrating the latent demand for stablecoin payments in the Web2 market.

On another front, as the main payment standard for the X402 protocol, USDC is integrating into Web2 via AI agents.

Chainalysis data shows that transactions above $1 on the X402 protocol are in clear growth, while transactions below $1 are declining.

Bee Bro’s take is that bandwagon and test transactions are decreasing, but actual payments are increasing.

Official X402 data shows that in the past month, there were 75.41 million transactions totaling $24.24 million, with 94,060 buyers and 22,000 sellers.

An average of 701.72 transactions per buyer suggests the payers on X402 are primarily AIs.

An average of 4.27 buyers per seller and 3,427.73 transactions received per seller suggests the recipients are mainly real projects or institutions receiving payments, not test projects.

╰✦Impact of rate hikes

Current market expectations point to one rate hike in September 2026. While it’s not yet certain whether a hike will happen, the expectation alone can influence Treasury yield volatility.

┈➤Trading Perspective

The blue line is USDC market cap, the green line is 「USDC market cap × 2-month Treasury yield」, and the orange line is CRCL’s stock price.

You can see that from last October to now, CRCL has broadly tracked 「USDC market cap × 2-month Treasury yield」. And the chart suggests CRCL may be slightly undervalued.

┈➤Final Thoughts

There shouldn’t be a wall between US stocks and crypto in the first place.

From an industry perspective, crypto is essentially a branch of IT, just another channel for digitization.

It’s turning centralized servers into multi-node distributed servers;

turning a one-to-many service relationship between server and client into a peer-to-peer, many-to-many relationship;

turning opaque or supposedly transparent centralized processes into decentralized ones that are actually more transparent…

From a financial perspective, crypto ETFs are launching one after another, and stock RWA is heating up fast.

Circle ( $CRCL ) is really a hybrid enterprise with one foot in crypto, one foot in payments, deeply tied to macro conditions.

US stock trading on CEXs like Binance, the latter half of the crypto bear market, and growing demand for Web3 payments from both traditional finance and the crypto ecosystem could all boost USDC’s scale, which in turn increases Circle’s reserve assets and reserve income.

On the other hand, US rate hikes — or expectations of them — could push Circle’s yield higher.

Circle and Nomura Plan to Launch Stablecoin Settlement Service in Japan, Earliest Launch as Early as 2027

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