Circle Internet Group, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. My name is Kelvin, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Circle Internet Group's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to John Andrews, vice president of capital markets and investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning. I'd like to welcome you to Circle's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. I'm joined by Jeremy Allaire, our co-founder, chief executive officer and chairman, and Jeremy Fox-Gein, our chief financial officer. Earlier this morning, we posted our earnings press release and earnings presentation on the Circle Investor Relations website, investor.circle.com. The transcript of this call will be posted on that website once available. I do 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. The events and circumstances reflected in our forward-looking statements may not be achieved or occur, and actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings. We will also disclose non-GAAP financial measures on this call today. Definitions of those non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the earnings release and earnings presentation, which are posted on CIRCLE's investor relations website, investor.circle.com. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for GAAP measures. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Jeremy Allaire. Jeremy.

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. I want to start this morning talking a little bit about what I'm seeing in terms of this extraordinary transformation that's underway. I'm speaking not just about the changes we're seeing from blockchains and stablecoins, but the broader backdrop of technology acceleration, software-powered technology acceleration, and artificial intelligence. I believe we are in the earliest stages of a very deep and very fundamental transformation of the way the global economic system functions and works. Not only will our global economic system become more internet native, but it's also going to become dramatically more automated. We're entering a world where, in my view, likely tens or hundreds of billions of AI agents will interact and perform economic functions over the internet. If we look at the past decades, we've seen this progression And this progression has been accelerating. This progression has been one where we build more and more software native infrastructure, more and more data and transactions on the internet. The progression from the internet of information into an internet of software distribution, interactive media, and commerce, all made possible through the adoption of web, cloud, and mobile platforms has created extraordinary value over time. Beginning around 2013, we began to see another transition, this time into the value era of the internet, where early blockchain platforms emerged. Later, through the innovation of fiat-backed stablecoins, we saw the birth of a transformative internet-native money layer. Now, as we've achieved regulatory clarity and as the technology has matured, we're now seeing these developments directly colliding with another major platform shift. which is the adoption of AI platforms. This value era, this combination of economic operating systems and an internet native money layer with artificial intelligence, agentic economic activity and automation seems likely to drive the greatest acceleration of economic activity we've ever seen in human history. And we're really just at the beginning. Our aim at Circle has always been to build a new internet financial system to build a software infrastructure that powers it. And we're more excited than ever to have that opportunity today. Let's talk about our key highlights in Q4. Our stablecoin network continued to grow. We saw USDC end the year around $75 billion in circulation, up 72% year on year, despite some of the declines that we saw in Q4 due to the crypto market correction. We also saw tremendous ongoing growth in the amount of transactions happening on our network, with on-chain USDC volume hitting nearly $12 trillion, representing 247% year-on-year growth. This continues to reflect the growing velocity and utility of digital dollars on the internet. Q4 delivered very strong financial results. We realized $770 million in total revenue and reserve income in the quarter, up 77% year on year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $167 million, up 412% year on year, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 54%. Overall for the quarter, we had very strong yearly growth across the board. Importantly, our platform continues to expand. We launched the testnet of ARK, our Layer 1 blockchain network, and we're on track to launch Mainnet this year. Circle Payments Network continues to see very strong volume growth and participant expansion as we continue to see traction in real-world payments and cross-border settlements. We're also adding new products. We introduced StableFX in beta, our new on-chain FX app. and X Reserve, which supports continued expansion of USDC across a wide range of blockchain ecosystems. And we now support USDC on over 30 different blockchain networks, with interoperability being a key piece of Circle's platform strategy. Mainstream adoption continues to deepen across a broad range of leading enterprises and institutions. Intuit and Circle are partnering for Intuit to bring low-cost programmable money through Circle's technology to its millions of consumers and businesses. Visa continues to expand its integration of Circle's stablecoins, announcing the launch of USDC settlement that permits U.S. Visa card issuers and acquirers to settle outside of normal banking hours using USDC. And earlier this month, circle and polymarket the largest prediction market in the world announced a formal partnership where polymarket will continue to advance its use of usdc as the core collateral and settlement asset for their markets demonstrating our very strong position as the leading regulated stablecoin network now these are just the tip of the iceberg major enterprises and financial institutions continue to integrate and support usdc in their businesses We saw firms as diverse as Cash App, Gusto, Deal, Interactive Brokers, JP Morgan, and MasterCard launch products and offerings that took advantage of USDC. Right now, we're seeing more activity from startups, enterprises, and financial firms than we've ever seen in our history. The stablecoin market continues to grow strongly, and our position in that market continues to strengthen as well. Fiat-backed stablecoins grew $85 billion in the year with 46% year-on-year growth. Within that market, our competitive position remains strong and we continue to maintain a significant share. Importantly, it's a market that despite the efforts of many other firms to enter and compete, is really a market of two major issuers. And this reflects the very durable network effects that we maintain that are significant barriers to entry and adoption. Looking at growth in actual transaction volumes, Circle's share of transaction volume grew from 39% in the third quarter to nearly 50% in the fourth quarter. This is based on Visa's published analysis, which works to eliminate internal transactions, exchange wallet rebalancing, and bots to really capture the volume that better reflects real economic activity. You can also note that while there have been a number of other stablecoins entering the market over the past year, their usage in real transactions is effectively zero. As noted in my introductory comments, Circle's network grew strongly, with 3.5x year-on-year growth in on-chain transaction volume. And notably, CCTP, a critical infrastructure for interoperable usage of USDC, grew 3.7x year-over-year to over $41 billion of volume in the fourth quarter. I know that competition is a major topic for many, so I want to talk again about the durable network effects that circle maintains. foundationally circles competitive position has been built on trust as an audited public company with a deep commitment to compliance. As a firm regulated across jurisdictions around the world and with the highest levels of transparency possible. We enjoy the trust of major financial institutions, payments companies, enterprises, developers, and end users around the world. And that trust shows up in our fundamental liquidity with $75 billion of USDC in circulation and unmatched liquidity infrastructure that in Q4 supported $163 billion of minting and redemption volume. That minting and redemption, That promise to create and redeem a digital dollar one for one at scale and through banking systems around the world is completely unmatched by any other player in the market. In Q4 25, we saw distribution and network usage grow, as noted, to nearly $12 trillion of on-chain transaction volume, continued growth in meaningful wallets using USDC, and our product platform continuing to expand. The breadth of infrastructure we provide, the breadth of liquidity services that we provide, and with new applications like CPN and StableFX, our whole product platform is not something others in our market are able to replicate. And crucially, acting as a market-neutral infrastructure, not competing with our customers and our partners, and building widely accessible and usable technology across as many platforms as possible have been keys to our competitive success as well. Moving on to our platform expansion. Circle's platform has really evolved from being a stablecoin network to being a comprehensive platform and infrastructure partner for on-chain finance, spanning our three platform pillars. ARK and our developer infrastructure, which includes the tools, the operating systems, and the on-chain protocols and infrastructure to enable the internet financial system to flourish, our digital assets and services, which includes USDC and EURC, the world's leading regulated digital dollar and digital Euro, tokenized funds such as USYC, and liquidity services such as Circle Mint and X Reserve that ensure liquid and available stablecoins around the world. And our apps. CPN is a rapidly growing application service from Circle for payments, and in beta now, StableFX, an application service for FX. We continue to invest in our platform and our infrastructure to expand what we can provide to companies around the world. With ARK and our developer infrastructure, we're seeing very strong progress. ARK Testnet launched in Q4 with over 100 companies in banking, capital markets, digital assets, technology, commerce, and payments. All leading brands actively testing, evaluating, and working with us to bring this into commercial production. We've had near 100% uptime since the launch of our testnet, with an average of half a second for transaction settlement finality, over 166 million total transactions, and we're now averaging around 2.3 million daily transactions in our testnet environment. We're on track to launch mainnet in 2026, and we're thrilled with the progress we're making. More exciting things to come in terms of technology, partnerships, and our ultimate mainnet launch. I also want to touch a little bit more on CCTP. Obviously, we've had very strong year-on-year growth, very strong growth in the number of transactions that are happening over this network. But I want to call your attention to the market share for CCTP. You can see here that for USDC, CCTP is nearly all of the traffic that flows from moving USDC across blockchains. But we also reach more than 50% of all bridge volume. not just of USDC, but of all assets across chains that we track. And in fact, in January, that volume reached 62%. CCDP is becoming a critical infrastructure for how value moves on the internet. And we're excited with our advancements in CCDP and the advancements in our interoperability infrastructure through our acquisition of Interop Labs. Through these advancements, we're building new capabilities that are really aimed at helping asset issuers of all types, whether you're issuing tokenized stocks, tokenized funds, tokenized bank deposits, and new stablecoins, to be able to take advantage of this tremendous interoperability infrastructure to enable your assets to travel on these highways that Circle has built to move value on the internet more seamlessly. We view interoperability infrastructure as a huge opportunity for us. And we also saw strong growth in Circle's other digital assets. In the fourth quarter, EURC reached €310 million, representing 3.8x year-on-year growth, and has already grown 25% since quarter end to €389 million as of February 20th. This reflects the growing demand for regulated euro-denominated stablecoins, and EURC remains the largest euro stablecoin. USYC, Our tokenized money market fund has also grown strongly since Q3. We acquired USYC in January of last year. We integrated it into Circle, and we developed a new product and distribution strategy around it, focused on tokenized collateral on digital asset exchanges. With the relaunch of USYC, we've seen accelerating growth driven by demand for USYC as collateral on leading exchanges like Binance and others. USYC assets ended the year at approximately $1.5 billion and have continued to grow to now over $1.7 billion in assets since quarter end. In our APPS pillar, Circle Payments Network continues to scale. We have 55 financial institutions enrolled. That's up from 29 in the third quarter. We have 74 financial institutions that are currently in eligibility reviews, and we continue to maintain a strong pipeline with interest from hundreds of banks, payments firms, and others all around the world. We've continued to expand the markets where CPN is available with live flows now in 14 markets across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. And importantly, CPN volumes continue to ramp with annualized volume based on a trailing 30-day period as of February 20th, reaching $5.7 billion. That's growing approximately 68% from our third quarter earnings update. We are aggressively investing in product development for CPM and have a strong pipeline of upcoming country launches and anticipate adding 11 new markets in the coming months. We also launched stable FX in production beta. This extends our application layer by combining institutional grade FX execution with on-chain atomic settlement. enabling 24-7 capital-efficient currency conversion and simplified risk management. We have stablecoin issuers from many jurisdictions participating in this, and we are excited to bring this application online alongside ARK, which will benefit the entire digital asset ecosystem and provide key infrastructure as we continue to scale CPN as well. I want to talk specifically about AI at Circle. We are seeing an explosion of developer activity around AI, and it's becoming an important driver for Circle's platform. And we believe an important and potentially significant driver for USDC adoption. We have a number of initiatives here. As many of you may have seen, when OpenClaw, the new open source autonomous agent system came out, We quickly responded and ran an agent only hackathon where agents competed with each other to build innovative applications with us DC and agents themselves voted on the winners and we saw incredible engagement on this. we're also building systems to better support agentic payments, in fact, we just went into test net release of a new capability with circle gateway. that allows for agents to autonomously and programmatically automate cross-chain USDC transactions with a transaction cost of one one-thousandth of a penny. This is live on our test net, and we're thrilled with what this is going to enable in terms of agentic payments and monetization models on the internet. We believe that no other payment system in the world can do this. We're also investing in helping developers who are building AI agents and are using AI for their own development to build faster and smarter with Circle products. We're bringing our capabilities as an infrastructure provider into skills libraries and providing servers that allow developer tools and AI agents to directly use Circle products, and we're seeing great uptake on this. Now, inside Circle, AI is also becoming foundational infrastructure across all of our functions. We began our work with AI, like many companies, over the last two years, our investments there are accelerating we're making core ai infrastructure and automation a critical component that's embedded into all of our operations agentic infrastructure specialized tooling and specific ai playbooks we're building the governance that will allow all of our employees to self-serve develop deploy and use ai agents across their functions and we're deepening AI integration across every aspect of our product development, design, engineering, and deployment lifecycle, and seeing very strong results. Our product velocity is accelerating, and I anticipate that to continue alongside the exponential improvements we're seeing from AI coding agents. Now, my own belief is that AI platforms AI agents and blockchain based economic operating systems will support trustworthy, automated, transparent and hyper efficient infrastructures that are going to be the underpinnings of the future of the global economic system. And I believe that this is going to be one of the most accelerated periods of technology transformation in the history of the world. And it really is just thrilling to be here building core infrastructure that can help to underpin this new economic system. I've never been more excited about Circle's market position, platform stack, and our growth opportunities. With that, let me turn it over to Jeremy Fox-Gein, our CFO, to take you through the financial results.