Circle Internet Group, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and welcome to Circle Internet Group first quarter 2026 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Scott Blair, Circle's head of strategic finance. Scott, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning. I'd like to welcome you to Circle's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm Scott Blair, Circle's head of strategic finance. 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. 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. 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. Additionally, nothing in this presentation constitutes as 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. Definitions of those non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the earnings press 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. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jeremy Allaire.

Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone. I want to begin at a higher level and describe where I think we are in the guiding forces, driving CIRCLE's thinking and strategy. We believe we are going through the largest platform shift in the history of the internet, and it is accelerating. Specifically, this platform shift is the collision and compounding effect of new operating systems for intelligence and new operating systems for economic activity. These two major new technology infrastructures are converging into a new internet stack that we believe will transform the global economic system over the coming decade. Last quarter, we talked about the rise of AI agents and the agentic economy and the need for these AI agents to operate on economic infrastructure that enables trusted value exchange and economic coordination. We also talked about the next generation of blockchains forming into economic OSs where value, identity, policy, and contracts can execute and move across these new on-chain computer networks. We are rapidly moving into a world in which AI powered software machines coordinating on blockchain computers deliver an increasing share of global economic activity. This is a profound shift and one that is highly aligned with Circle's fundamental vision, mission, and strategy. We are building a leadership position in this new era from a position of considerable strength. Over the past several years, we have built out a broad-based internet financial platform that compounds through several reinforcing flywheels. Each pillar of Circle's platform is self-reinforcing. Our digital assets flywheel, encompassing our stablecoin network and core digital assets, drives increasing liquidity, utility, and developer integrations, which in turn continues to grow the value of the network. The ARK network, or what we call ARK, is entirely built on network flywheels and grows as more apps are launched, more assets are issued, and as liquidity and distribution flow through our interoperability infrastructure. These flywheels accrue to our network stakeholders, but also reinforce and help grow Circle's other platform pillars. Both of these, in turn, grow the flywheels for our own apps. Together, Circle's apps, including CPN and Circle Mint, continue to drive more use cases, greater transaction volume, user growth, and distribution. Our apps are anchored in Circle's digital asset network and are being built natively on Arc. These flywheels work together to create one of the most compelling internet financial platforms in the world. And now, we are layering across this entire platform the deep product and technology capabilities to compound alongside AI and agentic economic growth. Now turning to the quarter, I want to focus on a few key highlights. First, we ended the quarter with $77 billion of USDC in circulation, representing 28% year-over-year growth. Alongside USDC supply growth, we also saw enormous growth in transaction activity, with on-chain transaction volume up 263% to $21.5 trillion. Total revenue and reserve income of $694 million grew 20% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA grew to $151 million, 24% year-over-year growth, and we continue to maintain a strong adjusted EBITDA margin of 53%. We've also had a number of major platform and product launches recently, including today's launch of our new Circle agent stack, which I'll discuss in greater detail shortly. We launched CPN Managed Payments, which brings the power of CPN to banks, financial institutions, and payment service providers in a turnkey fashion. And we continue to see robust growth in CPN volumes and financial institution adoption, while also seeing many more mainstream USDC launches and integrations. Finally, the ARK network is getting ready for liftoff. We have had a highly successful testnet, and today we announced the presale of the ARK token raising $222 million at a $3 billion fully diluted network value with lead investor A16Z Crypto alongside a range of other outstanding strategic partners. Turning to our stablecoin network and digital assets growth and adoption, we continue to see very strong enterprise and use case expansion. Meta, the world's most preeminent social platform, began using USDC for creator payouts. This is significant because just last year, there was a view that big tech companies would introduce their own stablecoins. We've been very clear that the network effects, liquidity, and global reach of our network, along with sound regulation, make USDC the preferred option for major enterprises integrating this technology, and that it makes little sense for these companies to go it alone. Meta is demonstrating exactly that. We're seeing this across the board. DoorDash paying out USDC to drivers. and other global enterprises embracing USDC in their payments flows. Polymarket adopting USDC for funding and settlement on their leading prediction market. Innovative financial institutions like Airbor Bank using USDC to power 24-7 banking, and expanded relationships with leading exchanges, including the top exchanges in Korea, a thriving market with significant growth opportunities for USDC. In capital markets, we're continuing to see strong expansion. Circle is participating in a DTCC test run of tokenized securities trading, and we're seeing emerging traction with USDC as collateral on regulated derivatives exchanges. In the traditional enterprise space, treasury management applications are really taking hold. We recently announced a broad partnership with Kyriba, one of the leading treasury management platforms, serving thousands of enterprises and many Fortune 100 companies to make USDC payment flows a seamless part of their solution. Ramp, one of the fastest growing fintechs in enterprise treasury and payments, is adopting USDC for a wide range of international and domestic use cases. And cross-border and treasury flows are increasingly moving to USDC across leading banks, fintechs, and even the startup ecosystem, with Y Combinator driving funding operations in USDC. The use cases are expanding, and this is driving further flywheels. While the stablecoin market itself was relatively flat in the quarter, it grew 32% year over year. More importantly, stablecoin transaction volumes continued to grow. According to Visa's reported figures on commercial transaction volume, USDC continued to gain market share and now accounts for 63% of all stablecoin transactions. Looking more broadly at on-chain volume, USDC transaction volume grew over 260% year-over-year to $21.5 trillion in the quarter. Other third-party data sources, which include Solana transaction volume, put USDC's volumes at nearly $30 trillion in the quarter, with our market share at approximately 80% of all on-chain transaction volume. I want to underscore an important point. USDC is the most widely transacted and used dollar digital currency in the world, period. No dollar digital currency is achieving anywhere near the volume of on-chain transactions as USDC. And as this market accelerates, We believe this leadership position and the network effects that flow from it will continue to compound to circle. We also remain the most liquid and available digital dollar in the world, having minted and redeemed nearly $150 billion of USDC in Q1 alone, providing reliable and compliant digital dollar dial tone to our global liquidity network all around the world. Alongside USDC's growth, we are seeing strong growth from our other digital assets. EURC, which has long been the world's largest euro stablecoin, grew 2x year over year, ending the period at 358 million euro. Our tokenized money market fund, USYC, grew over 300% year over year, and as of May 7th, stands at over $3 billion in assets. Circle's USYC is now the largest tokenized money market fund in the world, and a key building block for collateral in digital asset trading markets. We are also expanding our digital assets portfolio. We recently announced the planned introduction of a new Bitcoin product from Circle, SurBTC, which pending official launch would provide a compliant and secure wrapped version of Bitcoin that would be issued by Circle on both the Ethereum and ARK networks. We see a significant opportunity for programmable on-chain primitives for Bitcoin from Circle. As I mentioned in my opening, ARK is getting ready for liftoff with the ARK Mainnet launch coming soon. ARK has been designed with a broad group of incredible partners from across the financial system. We have built what we believe will be one of the most institutionally ready networks in the world, a network that will be operated by leading financial institutions with the trust required for global economic infrastructure. We are bringing powerful interoperability infrastructure to the network, and we have optimized ARK for asset issuers, payments firms, and capital markets applications. ARK comes with purpose-built features that simplify how stablecoins and tokenized assets bring the financial system and financial services onto these new operating systems. And everything has been designed from day one with AI and agentic flows in mind. from developer tooling to new services on Arc built entirely for AI agents. Arc is not just our core layer one. At launch, Arc will support a suite of assets and protocols from Circle and third parties. We are bringing incremental services to make these accessible and ready and providing a comprehensive set of developer tools and bundled applications from Circle to deliver meaningful value to Arc users on day one. Our testnet has performed very well users are transacting at scale arc has a vibrant and growing developer community building on the platform and i believe we and the entire ecosystem are prepared as we approach mainnet launch i want to focus on one of the most significant components of our strategy with arc and more broadly for circle we are becoming the leading interoperability platform in the entire blockchain ecosystem As you can see, we've continued to scale the cross-chain transfer protocol, reaching almost $50 billion of volume in Q1, representing 3x growth year over year. Our share of interoperability has already grown to approximately 60% of all cross-chain traffic. We're now turning that network reach and utility into a strategic customer capability with ARK. We've announced that we're opening up CCTP to other asset issuers. We built the highways for USDC and now we're opening them to other stable coin and real world asset issuers. Anyone doing tokenization can get the same interoperability, safe transport and distribution that we've already built around the world across all these blockchain networks. We're also turning on seamless bridges for end users and enabling flows of leading assets from other chains with a new canonical bridge from Circle. This infrastructure, with safety, trust, and monetization options available to both Circle and third parties that use them is a pillar capability of Arc and Circle's platform more broadly. And this is coming at a very important time as recent hacks put into question the safety and reliability of some of our competitor networks. And our focus on foundational security was further reinforced with our post-quantum readiness roadmap announcement including that transaction messages on ARK will be post-quantum secure on day one. On our path to building ARK, we are excited to announce today that Circle has undertaken a presale of the ARK token. Alongside the presale, we have released the ARK token white paper, available today on the ARK website. The ARK token will help to bootstrap and scale the network by aligning participants, including Circle, with the long-term success of the network. and enabling governance, staking and security and other protocol functions across the network. This is about building a new economic OS with broad-based stakeholders across the global financial and developer ecosystem. That means that every app builder, every end user and every institution building and operating on the network can become a stakeholder and ultimately participate in governance. Our ARK token presale was led by A16Z Crypto and includes some of the world's largest asset managers, including Apollo Funds, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Janus Henderson Investors, exchange, fintech, and capital markets firms such as Bullish, Intercontinental Exchange, Marshall Weiss, and SBI Group, and leading global banks such as Standard Chartered Ventures, as well as venture firms, including General Catalyst, Han Ventures, and IDG Capital. As I noted at the outset, ARK is built as an economic OS that anticipates this convergence with AI operating systems, and we are accelerating our product investments in this space, both on top of ARK and by building on the wide range of applications and integrations that already exist for USDC. We are rolling out key parts of the Circle Agent Stack. This morning, we launched Agent Wallets, a new product that allows agents to permissionlessly build on-chain wallets, conduct transactions, on-ramp USDC, and operate within predefined policies and safety guardrails. We also brought Agent Nano Payments online, where USDC transactions as small as one millionth of a penny enable high-frequency machine-to-machine payments. And all of these features are built supporting interoperability across agents and API services through the X402 standard, which Circle is helping to design. USDC already has an enormous lead in agentic payments today, with 99.8% of all X402 agentic payments being settled using USDC. We also launched the first version of our agent marketplace. An open hub for users and agents to discover, pay for, and invoke agent services that transact in USDC programmatically, with over 500 endpoints already available for agents. Finally, we launched the Circle Platform CLI, providing a command line interface to the full range of Circle's infrastructure and enabling both developers and AI agents to bootstrap, build, automate, and integrate all of Circle's infrastructure into AI applications. Our adoption of AI is not just outward looking. We are undertaking a significant internal transformation and AI adoption inside Circle is accelerating. We are building an AI driven company, aggressively rolling out AI infrastructure and building agentic workflows to drive productivity and acceleration across the business. With this, our product velocity is increasing dramatically. You may have noticed that we are shipping more technology at greater speed enabled by AI-assisted development harnesses. We are also reimagining every business function, with AI agents proliferating across Circle and beginning to manifest new ways of coordinating, executing, and delivering our business. Notably, we have seen rapid uptake of AI coding tools. Weekly active users of AI tools building automations at Circle have rapidly grown to approximately 85% of employees. Our teams have already deployed over 600 AI native apps this year, as we have capitalized on major breakthroughs in agentic and AI development. As a regulated company, we approach this comprehensively, considering the impact on our talent, security posture, financial controls, and the governance required to ensure these deployments are conducted safely. We will continue to discuss our AI transformation, as it is one of the most exciting things happening as we become an agentic, AI-driven company. We are also continuing to see strong progress with our expanded payments products. With multiple major new product launches since introducing CPN, the product line is now becoming robust and competitive. And CPN has been growing. We ended the quarter with $8.3 billion of annualized total payment volume on a trailing 30-day basis, up 17% quarter over quarter. And as of May 7th, we are approaching $10 billion of annualized TPV, up nearly 75% since we last reported. We've now enrolled over 136 financial institutions into using CPN products, up 36% quarter over quarter. Alongside this growth, we recently introduced CPN managed payments. To put managed payments in context, many banks, financial institutions, and payments firms are challenged to get up and running on stablecoin payment networks such as CPN. The biggest hurdles have been licensing, USDC liquidity, account infrastructure for stablecoin custody, and blockchain compliance operations, most of which they have not yet built out on their own. With managed payments, we offload that complexity onto Circle, where we operate these capabilities as a managed service. We can bring a bank into CPN on an accelerated basis, delivering all of the benefits of Circle's global infrastructure. are compliance, liquidity, network effects, and interoperability, while compressing time to market. We see this as a significant opportunity to bring banks, payments firms, and financial institutions onto CPN at scale. I will conclude with where I started. Today, Circle is an early-stage company and at the beginning of executing against our long-term strategy. We have built fantastic platforms and businesses. And we are fortunate to work with an extraordinary number of leading institutions. Each quarter, we see more of the greatest companies in the world, the leading technology companies, financial companies, enterprises, and others adopting our technology to make the financial system work better. We are entering a fundamentally different era, an internet financial system era in which economic operating systems and intelligence operating systems are colliding. Software powered money. a software powered economic system. This convergence of AI and economic activity is happening at internet scale and velocity. We see glimpses of this today with the power of open programmable money on our stablecoin network, which is seeing significant growth in the velocity and quantum of transactions. And we are laying down the next major layers that are necessary for this new internet paradigm to accelerate and take hold. It's an incredibly exciting time to be building here at Circle. and we are thrilled with the progress we've continued to make this past quarter. With that, let me turn it over to Jeremy Fox-Gein, our CFO, to take you through the financial results.