Circle CEO Calls Stablecoins a ‘Winner-Take-Most’ Marketplace

Stablecoins are trying to shed their reputation as a paradox in the payments space.

Stablecoins are technologically elegant yet commercially precarious, and they are plagued by questions about their utility. However, their long-term architectural ambitions are becoming harder to ignore in traditional finance, particularly when it comes to cross-border money movement and capital markets.

“More and more firms who are involved in money movement, who are involved in cross-border money movement, … all of those want to take advantage of the speed and capital efficiency and cost efficiency of stablecoin infrastructure,” Circle Internet Group CEO Jeremy Allaire said during his firm’s third-quarter 2025 earnings call Wednesday (Nov. 12).

“We’re seeing the catalysts from established firms…,” he added.

Circle’s own response is to evolve from product to platform. Its flagship dollar-backed coin, USDC , remains the foundation with over $73 billion in segregated cash reserves backing it, but the company is building a full stack of complementary services.

The Circle Payments Network connects financial institutions for instant USDC settlement. Developer APIs let FinTechs embed stablecoin payments into their products. And now, the company has unveiled Arc , a blockchain designed to make money programmable.

Each layer reinforces the others. USDC supplies liquidity. CPN provides the rails. Arc offers a programmable substrate for value exchange. Taken together, these form a modular infrastructure, like the layered protocols that once gave rise to the commercial internet itself.

Still, Circle’s share price fell around 7% Wednesday morning, despite the stablecoin issuer posting better-than-expected quarterly earnings. The alleged culprit wasn’t weak performance, but guidance. Management lifted its expense outlook for the year, signaling heavier investment in growth.

Read also: Stablecoins Threaten Traditional Cross-Border Rails

Building the Operating System for Digital Money

Step back from the quarterly results, and Circle’s trajectory looks less like a traditional payments company and more like a hybrid between an internet protocol and a regulated financial platform.

In that sense, Circle’s ambitions echo those of early internet pioneers who built the protocols that made the web usable for commerce. Just as HTTP abstracted away the complexity of network communication, Circle aims to abstract away the friction of global money movement. The result could be a world where sending dollars is as seamless as sending data. It’s a vision that has animated cryptocurrency’s most enduring promises but has rarely been realized at scale.

“Circle’s infrastructure [is] fundamental to this on-chain and DeFi-based financial system that’s emerging,” Allaire said during the call. “… I think the bigger idea … is that the ability to take what we think of as the building blocks of the financial system and move those into code and smart contracts and tokenized assets that run on the internet is like a wholesale architecture shift.”

Circle is building “an Economic OS for the internet,” he added.

Launched in May, CPN spans eight countries, with 29 enrolled financial institutions, 55 in review and 500 in the pipeline. Based on the trailing 30 days of activity, the network is moving at an annualized $3.4 billion in transaction volume.

Still, that $3.4 billion is mere peanuts compared to the trillions of dollars in volumes other payment networks handle.

The Arc public testnet , launched Oct. 28, is the centerpiece of Circle’s strategy. The company described it as a “programmable financial infrastructure” for global commerce. More than 100 firms, including banks, asset managers and payment providers, joined the launch. Circle is also exploring a native token for Arc, a step that would mark an evolution of its business model.

See also: Stablecoin Orchestration Becomes New Blockchain Battleground

Market Share and the Network Effect

Success in the stablecoin business isn’t just about trust or liquidity; it’s about integration density. If Circle executes, it could emerge as the de facto operating system for the digital-dollar economy, one that traditional finance builds on rather than competes against. But that will require navigating a world where technology, regulation and monetary policy are converging faster than ever.

“We’ve seen consortiums of major companies launch stablecoin products that effectively have zero circulation,” Allaire said during the call. “We’ve seen very large players with huge numbers of users push, push, push on this to get very, very little traction. I think the misunderstanding is that stablecoin networks are like other internet platform utilities, meaning they have network effects, and those network effects come from the number of products and services and integrations to the network.”

“This is a winner-take-most market structure,” he added.

At the same time, competition is intensifying. Tether ’s USDT still dominates in absolute size, but its market share has been slipping as USDC gains traction in regulated environments. Meanwhile, a new crop of yield-bearing tokens and tokenized money market funds, including Circle’s own USYC , which grew over 200% since June to nearly $1 billion, are blurring the line between stablecoins and investment products. The race is no longer just about liquidity; it’s about utility, compliance and yield.

“[G]rowth has come from, yes, the regulatory clarity, but also I think the overall just advancements in the technology and all of that combined is leading towards more market activity, more major financial institutions, payments firms, neobanks, large enterprises who are implementing stablecoin in their products and services,” Allaire said during the call.

Looking ahead, Circle expects to maintain a 40% compound annual growth rate in USDC circulation over the next several years.