According to Woofun AI, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) has officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and simultaneously launched its institutional-grade public blockchain Arc, marking a dual strategic milestone for USDC on September 16.

The move aims to reshape the competitive landscape of the stablecoin market through deep partnerships with top-tier institutions including BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), Visa (NYSE: V), and Mastercard (NYSE: MA).

This initiative is not merely an extension of traditional financial infrastructure, but a critical step for Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) to leverage regulatory barriers and capital operations to break through in the oligopolistic stablecoin arena.

From IPO fundraising to building a public blockchain ecosystem, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) is attempting to upgrade USDC from a simple payment tool into a core underlying asset connecting traditional finance and Web3, with a logic chain involving complex profit distribution, technical architecture reconstruction, and regulatory maneuvering.

The stablecoin market is not a low-barrier inclusive arena, but exhibits extreme oligopolistic characteristics.

Data from ARK Invest analyst Lorenzo Valente reveals a harsh reality: stablecoins with market capitalizations exceeding $1 billion have only slowly grown from single digits to 12 over the past four years; while top players with market caps surpassing $10 billion numbered four at the 2022 peak, now only Tether and Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) remain.

This cliff-like reduction in players profoundly reflects the core logic of network-effect assets鈥攚hether exchanges, payment networks, or DeFi protocols, their willingness to integrate depends entirely on the scale and depth of the asset.

Each level of threshold elevation dramatically reduces potential competitors, because scale itself constitutes the strongest moat.

The current competitive focus of the market is no longer simple technological iteration, but who can hold existing scale thresholds, who can climb upward through rule-breaking, and how regulatory and capital forces will push this zero-sum game in new directions.

Looking back at USDC's development history, it carried a clear compliance mission from birth.

In 2018, the CENTRE consortium initiated by Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) launched USDC, with its official positioning consistently emphasizing regulatory cooperation and reserve transparency, aiming to benchmark against USDT, which led in scale at the time but faced repeated transparency questions.

However, the early market valued liquidity depth over compliance certificates, and USDT's first-mover scale advantage forced USDC into a long-term "alternative" position.

Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL)'s capitalization path was equally turbulent. In 2021, it planned to go public via SPAC but failed by the end of 2022.

More critically, during the March 2023 Silicon Valley Bank crisis, approximately $3.3 billion of Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL)'s reserves were trapped in the failed bank, causing USDC to briefly depeg to $0.87.

This incident exposed the most vulnerable weakness of stablecoin companies鈥攖heir credit system is deeply tied to the safety of the traditional banking system, and any storm in traditional finance directly transmits to the price stability of crypto assets.

Data compiled by Woofun AI shows that after weathering the crisis, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) spent two years reconstructing its "compliance narrative," ultimately successfully listing on the New York Stock Exchange on June 5, 2025, under the ticker CRCL, becoming the first major stablecoin issuer to complete an IPO.

The IPO was priced at $31 per share, with an initial offering of 34 million shares, corresponding to a total offering size of approximately $1.05 billion; one week later, underwriters fully exercised the greenshoe option, expanding the total size to approximately $1.2 billion.

Capital flow data shows that in the initial offering, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) issued 14.8 million shares while early shareholders sold 19.2 million shares; after the greenshoe exercise, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) cumulatively issued approximately 19.9 million shares, netting approximately $583 million after underwriting fees.

Market reaction was extremely enthusiastic, with the stock opening up 122.58% on the first day and closing up 168.5%, with market capitalization exceeding $18 billion; the next day the stock surged to $119; by June 23, the stock hit an all-time high of $298.99, then fell nearly 40% over the following four trading days.

This was one of the highest first-day gains among IPOs exceeding $1 billion in the U.S. in recent decades, demonstrating the capital market's extremely high valuation expectations for compliant stablecoin issuers.

The financial structure disclosed in the prospectus reveals the essence of Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL)'s business.

As of April 2025, USDC circulation was approximately $60.1 billion, accounting for about 29% of the stablecoin market, while USDT's share was approximately 61%.

In 2024, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL)'s total revenue reached $1.676 billion, of which 99% came from interest income on reserve assets, a model analogized in the industry to a "narrow bank": no lending, only investing absorbed funds in short-term U.S. Treasuries to earn the spread.

However, the bulk of this business must be shared with distribution channels.

In 2024, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) paid approximately $908 million to Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), accounting for about 54% of total revenue that year.

Share acquisition is not a natural evolution but a channel agreement bought with real money.

Taking Binance as an example, in December 2024 the two parties reached a strategic cooperation, with Binance committing to hold at least $3 billion of its own Treasury in USDC, while Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) paid approximately $60.25 million in upfront fees and set up ongoing incentives tied to balances.

Additionally, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) relies on its official cross-chain protocol CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol), using a "burn-mint" mechanism to achieve native USDC deployment on over 20 public blockchains, avoiding the complexity of Wrapped Tokens.

In contrast, Tether's later USDT0, while attempting to solve liquidity fragmentation, chose a different technical route of lock-mint via LayerZero.

To break through the scale bottleneck of mere coin issuance, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) shifted its strategic focus to the infrastructure layer.

The Arc public blockchain and its sister product Circle Payments Network (CPN) aim to address institutional cross-border payment and asset tokenization needs.

In May 2026, Arc completed a native token private placement, raising $222 million at a fully diluted network valuation of $3 billion, led by a16z with participation from BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), Apollo (NYSE: APO), Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), and others.

Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL) thus became the first U.S.-listed company to conduct a token private placement after going public.

These tokens are currently only available to institutions with multi-year lockups, and governance voting and staking functions will be enabled after the network transitions to PoS.

This move is intended to transform institutions like BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), Visa (NYSE: V), and Mastercard (NYSE: MA) from mere asset holders into Arc's founding validators, directly involving them in transaction verification and network security maintenance, thereby building deeper interest alignment.

Compared to Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) Chain's model relying on retail traffic, Arc attempts to build an institutional-grade Layer 1 public blockchain by introducing financial institutions and ready-made infrastructure stacks. Before its launch, USDC was once bid up to a 1.8x premium, reflecting market expectations for its ecosystem potential.

Although USDC's growth has outpaced USDT for two consecutive years鈥攊n 2024 USDC grew 77% while USDT grew 50%; in 2025 USDC grew 73% to $75.1 billion while USDT grew 36% to $186.6 billion鈥攖he scale gap remains enormous, with USDC still less than half of USDT.

Entering 2026, USDC's growth slowed, with second-quarter year-over-year growth falling to 19%, and scale at approximately $73.3 billion.

When fourth-quarter 2025 earnings were announced, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL)'s stock jumped nearly 30% on better-than-expected combined revenue and reserve income of $770 million, showing that capital markets value profitability over mere scale.

However, regulatory risk always looms.

At the end of March, rumors that a new draft of the CLARITY Act could prohibit stablecoin interest-sharing caused CRCL to decline; on September 17, Circle Internet Corp. (NYSE: CRCL)'s stock closed at $85.09, with a market capitalization of approximately $21.6 billion, down 70% from its all-time high.

That day, the Federal Reserve announced a 25 basis point rate hike, and the U.S. Senate procedural vote failed to advance the CLARITY Act, with weakened regulatory expectations and changes in the interest rate environment jointly weighing on market sentiment.

The success or failure of Arc will determine whether USDC can truly recover through a "compliance-for-scale" strategy, or repeat the pattern of Meme hot money rushing in and out.