Circle's stock jumped from $31 to $299 in 17 days, pushing its market cap to $72 billion

Circle is bulldozing through Wall Street expectations, and the numbers are getting harder to ignore. The crypto company launched on the New York Stock Exchange just 17 days ago with shares priced at $31, raising $1.05 billion and putting its initial market cap around $6.8 billion.

But that opening price didn’t last a full hour. On the first day, Circle stock opened at $69 and ended at $83.23, up 168% by market close. Then it blew past $107.50 within two days. By June 23, the share price hit $299, taking the company’s valuation to over $72 billion before falling back to $64 billion at the Bell.

Circle’s IPO was so overloaded with demand that it was 25 times oversubscribed. That level of interest is almost unheard of in 2025, especially for a company tied so tightly to crypto. Investors didn’t just buy in — they chased the stock to a level that now has traditional finance guys like Jimmy Cramer calling it dangerous.

On June 10, when the company’s valuation had hit $25 billion, Cramer warned, “Circle is too hot,” and said its crypto exposure made it riskier than people were admitting. The stock is now almost three times that size, and the heat isn’t cooling.

Circle’s growth speed dwarfs fintech rivals

What’s made Circle’s run so disruptive is how quickly it happened. Most crypto-linked IPOs crawl their way to these numbers. Coinbase got to $78 billion and Robinhood reached $68 billion, but it took both of them far longer. Circle bulldozed its way to $70 billion in just 17 days.

It didn’t have to SPAC its way there or trickle up through gradual public hype. It jumped the fence, and now everyone’s looking around, asking what the hell just happened.

The company’s surge has been compared to past IPOs, but even those don’t really match. Circle’s 168% gain on its first trading day puts it in the same class as Beyond Meat’s 163% pop in 2019, though it still trails the 606% jump seen with TheGlobe.com back in 1998 and the 698% explosion of VA Linux in 1999.

But those were from a different time, the dot-com bubble days, when any stock with “.com” in the name had a rocket strapped to its back. And even though Circle’s price action is wild, it’s still being checked by the giants. Alibaba launched at a market cap of $231 billion. Saudi Aramco clocked in at $1.7 trillion.

Even Snowflake matched Circle’s current valuation on day one. But see, this isn’t just about size, it’s about speed, and the fact that Circle operates in crypto, a sector still crawling out from under layers of skepticism, regulation, and very recent disasters.

Critics say the company mispriced the IPO, and instead of capturing the real value for itself, it handed it over to Wall Street. And now that investors have seen the aftermath, the conversation has shifted to whether Circle’s valuation can hold or if a correction is coming fast.

Meanwhile, the broader market was dealing with something else: open conflict between Israel, Iran, and the United States. On Monday, the Dow gained 374.96 points, closing at 42,581.78. The S&P 500 went up 0.96% to end at 6,025.17, and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.94% to 19,630.97.

Stocks rallied after fears over an escalation faded. Iran’s military confirmed it fired missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, a US military hub housing roughly 10,000 troops, in retaliation for US strikes on nuclear sites in Fordo, Isfahan, and Natanz over the weekend. But Qatari defense systems intercepted the missiles, and there were no casualties.

That led oil traders to dump positions fast. If the strike didn’t damage US infrastructure or kill anyone, it wasn’t likely to mess with oil supply. So West Texas Intermediate crude dropped over 7%, settling at $68.51 per barrel, down from an overnight high above $78, the highest price since January.

President Donald Trump, speaking from the White House, confirmed that Iran gave advance warning of the attack, allowing the US to avoid any loss of life. “Made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He also praised Qatar’s emir for helping avoid escalation, and later posted, “It’s time for peace!” before saying that “the Iranian strikes resulted in no American or Qatari casualties.”

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