Stablecoin issuer Circle debuts on Wall Street’s NYSE at $31 per share

Circle started trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday under the ticker CRCL, pricing its initial public offering at $31 per share.

The company sold 34 million shares, raising $1.05 billion, after bumping the size of its offering due to heavy interest. Circle initially aimed to sell 24 million shares at $24–$26 per share. That plan didn’t last long. Demand from investors pushed the number up to 32 million, then again to 34 million just before the market opened.

The offering was led by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, who also secured a 30-day option to unload another 5.1 million shares.

With that flexibility, the total haul could climb even higher if the market stays interested. The shares will continue trading under CRCL, putting Circle on the public map for the first time since it was founded over a decade ago.

Circle founder Jeremy Allaire calls IPO a major milestone

Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s co-founder and CEO, posted on X to mark the occasion. “I am incredibly proud and thrilled to share that Circle is now a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under $CRCL,” he wrote. Jeremy said he started the company 12 years ago with the goal of “re-imagining and re-building” the financial system natively on the internet. He told every early hire and investor that it would be a “multi-decade opportunity” to build a new kind of platform.

Jeremy described the IPO as “a significant and powerful milestone,” saying the world is now ready to “start upgrading and moving to the internet financial system.” He added that Circle has always focused on being “trusted, transparent, compliant, ethical and well governed.”

Now that the company is under the SEC and NYSE’s watch, he believes those standards will only deepen. He ended his post thanking everyone who had been part of the journey and called the event a big moment for the internet’s role in the global economy.

Circle, which moved its headquarters from Boston to New York earlier this year, is one of the earliest companies in crypto. The company is best known for USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar and backed by reserves like Treasury bills.

USDC holds 27% of the stablecoin market, trailing only Tether’s USDT, which dominates with 67%. That second-place spot still makes Circle one of the most central players in global crypto infrastructure.

ARK, income numbers, and Circle’s narrow focus

Investor interest in the IPO wasn’t random. Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management filed a notice saying it’s looking to buy up to $150 million worth of Circle shares. That kind of attention helped justify the bump in offering size.

Unlike other fintech listings—Robinhood, eToro, or Block—Circle isn’t juggling multiple business lines. It’s not offering trading. It’s not pushing debit cards. It’s just stablecoins. And that makes it one of the few pure crypto infrastructure bets on Wall Street.

Circle earned $1.68 billion in revenue and reserve income in 2024, bringing in $156 million in net profit. That’s a drop from the $268 million in income it reported the year before on $1.45 billion in revenue, but the numbers still show strength. The business is profitable. And right now, that alone sets it apart from many other recent tech IPOs.

The broader IPO market has only recently started showing signs of life again. After slowing down in 2022, the comeback began with companies like eToro, which filed in March and debuted last month.

Since going public, eToro’s stock is up 25%. Infrastructure provider CoreWeave more than doubled after its own March IPO. In the past few weeks, Omada Health, Chime, and even Klarna have stepped forward with new filings.

But all of them come with broader platforms or apps. Circle is just USDC, and that simplicity is the entire point.

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