Circle Internet Group, one of the largest stablecoin issuers and finance platforms, has reported drastic growth of their stablecoin’s circulation, with USDC circulation growing 108% year-over-year.
Stablecoins are digital currencies that hold equivalent values to the fiat currencies they are pegged to. USDC, for example, is Circle’s stablecoin pegged to the U.S. Dollar. It is essentially a digital dollar, except it is digital, issued by Circle, and is not backed by the U.S. Treasury.
The increase in circulation drove spikes in other metrics. The company’s net income rose 202% from the same time in 2024 to $214 million, and adjusted EBITDA grew 78%, totaling $166 million.
According to Yahoo! Finance, 29 financial institutions are enrolled in Circle’s Payment Network, with 55 currently being reviewed and 500 “in the pipeline”.
This success could be seen as threatening to eat into Visa and Mastercard’s domination of the payment network market, something that is indicated by the recent forays of both companies into the space.
Visa announced on November 12th the continued expansion of a program merging stablecoin payments with their traditional global payment network. In the program, called Visa Direct, businesses can pay recipients in normal fiat currency, and the recipients can opt to receive the payment as stablecoins.
Mastercard partnered with money transfer platform Thunes to do the same thing, offering stablecoin wallets as an endpoint for transactions on their payment network.
The benefit of receiving payments as stablecoins across these networks is primarily speed. While U.S. Dollar payments face processing delays that may prevent them from reaching your wallet for a couple of days, stablecoin payments are processed 24/7 at high speeds on blockchain networks, and hit your wallets almost immediately.
This makes them an attractive evolution of money transfer technology for financial institutions that transfer money in large volumes. Receiving payment a day early can have a serious impact on their short-term liquidity.
