Full Transcript: Circle Internet Group Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL ) reported second-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company's second-quarter earnings call has been provided below. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

3 billion in circulation. Total revenue and reserve income reached $701 million, with adjusted EBITDA margin at 50%, demonstrating continued profitability. The company renewed its strategic partnership with Coinbase and received major regulatory approvals, including an OCC National Trust bank charter. Circle's ARK mainnet is set to launch on September 16, with partnerships from leading financial firms and a $242 million presale of the ARK token.

The company emphasized its strategic focus on expanding its stablecoin network, payments infrastructure, and agentic economy, with significant growth anticipated in these areas. Full Transcript Scott Blair, Head of Strategic Finance Good morning and welcome to Circle Internet Group's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm Scott Blair, Circle Internet Group's Head of Strategic Finance. 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. Information containing risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings.

Additionally, nothing in this presentation constitutes 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. com. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, GAAP measures.

Today I'm joined by Jeremy Allaire, our Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, and Jeremy Fox-Geen, our Chief Financial Officer, who will walk us through Q2 results. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jeremy Allaire. Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO Thank you, Scott. I'm excited to be here with all of you today to discuss Circle's second quarter results.

As I've done in the past, I want to begin at a higher level and put in context where we are and what is driving Circle strategy. We are living through a global moment. Around the world, governments, financial institutions and businesses are embracing digital dollars. Stablecoins are becoming federally regulated digital dollar money in the United States and similar frameworks are taking hold in major markets all around the world.

This is the moment Circle has been building toward for more than a decade. That moment has drawn enormous attention and with it competition. I want to address that directly. Circle is in a position of significant leadership.

We have built deep and durable competitive moats around trust, liquidity, regulatory standing, technology and network scale. Our position has never been stronger. At the center of that position is USDC and the extraordinary network we have built around it. That network was built with partners, including a strategic partnership with Coinbase that we have grown over many years and I'm pleased to share today that our agreement with Coinbase has renewed on its existing terms, ensuring that USDC remains central across all of Coinbase's products.

At the same time, we look forward to continuing to grow our USDC network through distribution arrangements with strategically aligned partners. Let me start with the foundations of that network. USDC is the leading stablecoin network in the world and it rests on significant technology and operational infrastructure. Circle and our stablecoin infrastructure are the most widely regulated in the industry.

We hold over 55 licenses and registrations across major jurisdictions. That position took years to establish and is what ensures the legal availability of our infrastructure around the world, something that will take others many years to replicate. The software infrastructure that powers this open network runs on every major blockchain technology, spanning 35 blockchain networks and reaching users in 185 countries. We provide the critical protocols and on-chain smart contracts that make digital dollars work seamlessly wherever users are, in whatever application they are using, in a safe way.

This is unparalleled in the industry. Alongside all of this, the financial infrastructure underneath USDC includes more than 15 partner banks around the world, from some of the largest global systemically important banks to critical fintech-focused banks, ensuring the liquidity that underpins our network. We have also built a network of more than 150 distribution partners that have an economic interest in embedding USDC, growing USDC and supporting it across their commercial platforms. This is expanding and accelerating and, critically, thousands of other companies are also part of our network with products and services that integrate USDC and use our infrastructure.

They span every sector: wallets, DeFi protocols, payment apps, banks, neobanks, asset managers, exchanges, custodians, trading firms, brokerages and large enterprises. These companies have built and continue to build fundamental utility around USDC. That strength is evident even in recently announced purported consortium projects. Approximately 70% of the companies that have expressed interest are already participants on our network.

Whatever role they may ultimately play in those projects, the more important fact is that they are already building on, distributing and supporting USDC. Today, our network is not theoretical or aspirational. It is the largest, deepest and most widely integrated in the industry and its scale creates powerful, self-reinforcing network effects that will be extraordinarily difficult to replicate. Liquidity is essential to those network effects and to Circle's competitive position.

On a primary basis, we have scaled USDC minting and redemption all around the world. 9 billion of daily minting and redemption, up 105% year over year. This is infrastructure that works at scale. On a secondary basis, several billion dollars of USDC trades every day, making USDC one of the most liquid digital currencies in the world.

And transaction volume on the network continues to grow robustly, with daily on-chain transaction volume averaging $163 billion per day in Q2, up 151% year over year. This liquidity is what makes digital dollars work in markets, in payments and across business applications. Turning to the quarter, I want to focus on a few key highlights. 3 billion of USDC in circulation, representing approximately 20% year over year growth.

Total revenue and reserve income was $701 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin demonstrated continued healthy profitability and transactional volume with USDC grew 151% year over year to nearly $15 trillion. We also saw expansion of our platform. In a huge milestone, we received our OCC National Trust bank charter and shortly thereafter an additional limited purpose trust charter from the State of New York.

And as announced today, we have major strategic partners coming alongside us for the ARC mainnet launch, which is happening this quarter. On September 16, in another milestone, global systemically important banks began offering USDC minting and redemption directly to their institutional clients. Our payments network, CPN, continued to see very robust growth, reaching nearly $15 billion in annualized total payment volume on a trailing 30-day basis at the end of Q2. And we continue to build out and strengthen flagship partnerships, from global banks to major regional financial technology players, payments companies and global financial firms.

I want to spend a moment on the National Trust bank because it represents something foundational. With final OCC approval, we have established Circle National Trust, an infrastructure bank for the Internet financial system. This is about confidence. Circle National Trust gives leading companies and financial institutions a federally supervised foundation on which to build digital asset services.

It allows us to bring core elements of USDC into this new federally supervised framework. And it becomes a way to project Circle's infrastructure into global markets for payments, for capital markets and for use of digital dollars in corporations all around the world. Now, moving on to details of our stablecoin network and digital asset growth and adoption, digital asset markets themselves have continued to see significant weakness. Even so, we saw overall growth on a year over year basis and continued to maintain volumes.

Building on digital dollars has continued to scale, growing 84% year over year. USDC continues to be the leader in stablecoin transaction volumes. In fact, according to Visa, USDC share of stablecoin transaction volume reached nearly 70% in the month of June, a new record. Key measures of usage and liquidity have continued to grow.

USDC on-chain transaction volume grew 151% year over year. While volume was down from the first quarter, which included significant activity from market makers, we continue to see steady growth in transactional utility. At the same time we are seeing record amounts of minting and redemption of USDC, with mint and redeem volume reaching $170 billion in Q2. This underscores USDC's critical and valuable role supporting payments and settlement, moving between fiat infrastructure around the world.

We are truly building fundamental new pipes for digital dollar movement globally and while much of the focus is on USDC, we continue to hold market-leading positions across our other digital assets. 2x year over year and remains the largest digital euro in the world. USY grew 10x year over year to become over $3 billion in assets and remains the largest tokenized money market fund in the world. I also want to talk about the significant evolution happening in digital trading markets and Circle's role in it.

Perpetual futures have become one of the most important tradable instruments in the world. The market has evolved from people buying and selling Bitcoin into people trading these perpetual futures at global scale on the largest centralized and decentralized platforms in the world. Binance and Hyperliquid. USDC's position has continued to strengthen, reaching 40% of open interest collateral in these markets, and there is a real shift happening in what people are trading.

The market is moving away from speculating on cryptocurrencies and into open global digital asset markets that support trading tokenized stocks, tokenized commodities and other tokenized assets. In fact, for the first time the majority of traded volume on Hyperliquid, one of the most important venues in the world, is now in real-world assets rather than digital commodities and cryptocurrencies, reaching nearly 75% of perps volume as of last week. This is a major change in the structure of the market and Circle is very well positioned as the leading provider of stablecoin infrastructure to these markets.

We are also seeing dramatic growth in prediction markets as a major source of digital asset trading activity. Spot volume on Polymarket grew more than 8x year over year and open interest posted in these markets grew more than 4x year over year. Polymarket is a strategic distribution partner for USDC, which underpins this activity. Now let me turn to Ark.

ARK is coming and we are excited to announce today that ARC mainnet will launch this quarter on September 16th. We have seen tremendous traction as the infrastructure gets ready for this moment. Our testnet has processed more than half a billion transactions across nearly 3 million wallets with nearly perfect uptime, and more than 100 partners are already active on our private mainnet preparing for the public launch. Crucially, ARK has been built as financial infrastructure to be run by the leading financial firms in the world.

Today we are announcing the initial cohort of firms that will operate the ARK blockchain network alongside Circle as network validators. This includes the world's leading asset manager, the world's leading equities and securities clearing firm, leading digital asset firms, the largest exchange group in the world, the two largest retail payments networks in the world, leading banks from around the world and leading payment processors and remittance companies. This is an incredible group running infrastructure that others can build on. No other blockchain has been built with this kind of strength.

It is an amazing milestone and we are thrilled for the launch in the coming weeks. Alongside the mainnet launch, we are announcing two major partnerships today. The first is with DTCC. DTCC underpins so much of our equities and securities markets today and DTCC is collaborating with Circle to bring tokenized securities to Ark, focusing first on enabling the tokenization of DTC custody assets on Ark.

Over time this extends to broader capabilities—tokenized repo, collateral mobility, corporate actions, securities lending, dividend distribution and participant reporting. This reflects ARK's infrastructure model, purpose-built for financial institutions with deterministic settlement finality, configurable privacy and a network operated by financial infrastructure companies. DTCC will participate in running the Ark Layer 1 network and DTC tokenized assets will carry the same protections, rights and safeguards that investors receive with traditionally held assets.

The second partnership is with BlackRock, who plans to deploy BUIDL on ARK to leverage our infrastructure with native USDC integration. This enables institutional investors to subscribe, redeem and deploy fund assets within a single on-chain environment, removing friction that has historically limited tokenized fund adoption at scale. Institutional fund management meets a network built for financial markets and stablecoin-native settlement. We could not be more excited about these two partnerships.

Turning to payments, we continue to see tremendous progress with CPN. At the end of Q2, annualized total payment volume reached nearly $15 billion on a trailing 30-day basis. That is tremendous growth on a year over year basis and on a quarter over quarter basis. We continue to enroll new financial institutions into the network, with nearly 30% quarter over quarter growth reaching 175 financial institutions, and the momentum has continued.

Sitting here today, as of July 31st, annualized total payment volume on a trailing 30-day basis has already reached $23 billion, representing 130% growth since our last earnings report. Alongside this growth, we are making major progress in product and market expansion. CPN and our related payments products are rolling out across international markets and now reach more than 58 countries. Our core operations infrastructure is enabling much more seamless onboarding for financial institutions with stronger operational tooling, and all of this is being integrated across our full stack, including Ark, Circle Mint and our new stable FX venue.

We're incredibly excited about this progress and we are excited about beginning to monetize CPN. I want to close the product discussion with Agentic Finance, where we are seeing emerging traction with Circle's Agent Stack. In the coming days we will be publishing a white paper and our near-term roadmap for the agentic economy. We are moving from a world where blockchains, stablecoins and digital wallets are the rails that agents can pay with to a world where agents can earn and monetize.

3% of agentic payments. More than 900 paid services are already available in our agent marketplace. As we go forward, we see a world where more and more agents conduct work and a labor market emerges for those agents. A developer can build and deploy an agent in minutes; that agent has its own identity; it can be discovered easily by other agents; and agents can monetize their services directly on-chain.

Reputation, trust and discovery are all critical to how the agent economy will evolve, and we are excited to lay out our roadmap for building and delivering this in the second half of this year. Our work on agentic infrastructure is also unfolding inside of Circle. We are building toward operating an agentic corporation. In the first half of this year we proved adoption at scale.

Eighty-six percent of our employees are weekly active users of AI tools. Our employees have shipped more than 1,100 AI apps this year, most of them over the course of Q2 and most by non-technical builders. Hundreds of agent skills have been published into an integrated Circle AI toolkit available across the company, and we now have continuous agent-run software development, with product development velocity up several hundred percent over the first half of the year.