Circle Internet Group, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Circle's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm Scott Blair, Circle's head of strategic finance. 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. Transcription by CastingWords Information containing risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings. Additionally, nothing in this presentation constitutes 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 can be found in the earnings release and earnings presentation, which are posted on investor.circle.com. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, GAAP measures. Today, I'm joined by Jeremy Allaire, our co-founder, chief executive officer and chairman, and Jeremy Fox-Geen, our chief financial officer, who will walk us through Q2 results. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jeremy Allaire. Thank you, Scott.

I'm excited to be here with all of you today to discuss Circle's second quarter results. As I've done in the past, I want to begin at a higher level and put in context where we are and what is driving Circle's strategy. We are living through a global moment. Around the world, governments, financial institutions, and businesses are embracing digital dollars. Stablecoins are becoming federally regulated digital dollar money in the United States, and similar frameworks are taking hold in major markets all around the world. This is the moment Circle has been building toward for more than a decade. That moment has drawn enormous attention, and with it, competition. I want to address that directly. Circle is in a position of significant leadership. We have built deep and durable competitive moats around trust, liquidity, regulatory standing, technology, and network scale. Our position has never been stronger. At the center of that position is USDC and the extraordinary network we have built around it. That network was built with partners, including a strategic partnership with Coinbase that we have grown over many years. And I'm pleased to share today that our agreement with Coinbase has renewed on its existing terms, ensuring that USDC remains central across all of Coinbase's products. At the same time, we look forward to continuing to grow our USDC network through distribution arrangements with strategically aligned partners. Let me start with the foundations of that network. USDC is the leading stablecoin network in the world, and it rests on significant technology and operational infrastructure. Circle and our stablecoin infrastructure are the most widely regulated in the industry. We hold over 55 licenses and registrations across major jurisdictions. That position took years to establish and is what ensures the legal availability of our infrastructure around the world, something that will take others many years to replicate. The software infrastructure that powers this open network runs on every major blockchain technology, spanning 35 blockchain networks and reaching users in 185 countries. We provide the critical protocols and on-chain smart contracts that make digital dollars work seamlessly wherever users are in whatever application they are using in a safe way. This is Unparalleled in the industry. Alongside all of this, the financial infrastructure underneath USDC includes more than 15 partner banks around the world, from some of the largest global systemically important banks to critical fintech-focused banks, ensuring the liquidity that underpins our network. We have also built a network of more than 150 distribution partners that have an economic interest in embedding USDC, growing USDC, and supporting it across their commercial platforms. This is expanding and accelerating. And critically, thousands of other companies are also part of our network, with products and services that have integrated USDC and use our infrastructure. They span every sector, wallets, DeFi protocols, payment apps, banks, neobanks, asset managers, exchanges, custodians, trading firms, brokerages, and large enterprises. These companies have built and continue to build fundamental utility around USDC. That strength is evident even in recently announced purported consortium projects. Approximately 70% of the companies that have expressed interest are already participants on our network. Whatever role they may ultimately play in those projects, the more important fact is that they are already building on, distributing, and supporting USDC today. Our network is not theoretical or aspirational. It is the largest, deepest, and most widely integrated in the industry, and its scale creates powerful self-reinforcing network effects that will be extraordinarily difficult to replicate. Liquidity is essential to those network effects and to Circle's competitive position. On a primary basis, we have scaled USDC minting and redemption all around the world. In the second quarter, we saw an average of $1.9 billion of daily minting and redemption, up 105% year-over-year. This is infrastructure that works at scale. On a secondary basis, several billion dollars of USDC trades every day, making USDC one of the most liquid digital currencies in the world. And transaction volume on the network continues to grow robustly, with daily on-chain transaction volume averaging $163 billion per day in Q2, up 151% year over year. This liquidity is what makes digital dollars work in markets, in payments, and across business applications. Turning to the quarter, I want to focus on a few key highlights. We ended the quarter with $73.3 billion of USDC in circulation, representing approximately 20% year-over-year growth. Total revenue and reserve income was $701 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin demonstrated continued healthy profitability, and transactional volume with USDC grew 151% year-over-year to nearly $15 trillion. We also saw expansion of our platform. In a huge milestone, we received our OCC National Trust Bank Charter, and shortly thereafter, an additional Limited Purpose Trust Charter from the State of New York. And, as announced today, we have major strategic partners coming alongside us for the ARC Mainnet launch, which is happening this quarter on September 16th. In another milestone, global systemically important banks began offering USDC minting and redemption directly to their institutional clients. Our payments network, CPN, continued to see very robust growth, reaching nearly $15 billion in annualized total payment volume on a trailing 30-day basis at the end of Q2. and we continue to build out and strengthen flagship partnerships from global banks to major regional financial technology players, payments companies and global financial firms. I want to spend a moment on the National Trust Bank because it represents something foundational. With final OCC approval, we have established Circle National Trust, an infrastructure bank for the internet financial system. This is about confidence. Circle National Trust gives leading companies and financial institutions a federally supervised foundation on which to build digital asset services. It allows us to bring core elements of USDC into this new federally supervised framework. And it becomes a way to project Circle's infrastructure into global markets for payments, for capital markets, and for use of digital dollars in corporations all around the world. Now, moving on to details of our stablecoin network and digital asset growth and adoption. Digital asset markets themselves have continued to see significant weakness. Even so, we saw overall growth on a year-over-year basis and continued-to-maintainment volumes building on digital dollars have continued to scale, growing 84% year-over-year. USDC continues to be the leader in stablecoin transaction volumes. In fact, according to Visa, USDC's share of stablecoin transaction volume reached nearly 70% in the month of June, a new record. Key measures of usage and liquidity have continued to grow. USDC on-chain transaction volume grew 151% year over year. While volume was down from the first quarter, which included significant activity from market makers, we continue to see steady growth in transactional utility. At the same time, we are seeing record amounts of minting and redemption of USDC, with mint and redeem volume reaching $170 billion in Q2. This underscores USDC's critical and valuable role supporting payments and settlement moving between fiat infrastructure around the world. We are truly building fundamental new pipes for digital dollar movement globally. And while much of the focus is on USDC, we continue to hold market-leading positions across our other digital assets. EURC grew 2.2x year over year and remains the largest digital euro in the world. USYC grew 10x year over year to become over 3 billion in assets and remains the largest tokenized money market fund in the world. I also want to talk about the significant evolution happening in digital trading markets and Circle's role in it. Perpetual futures have become one of the most important tradable instruments in the world. The market has evolved from people buying and selling Bitcoin into people trading these perpetual futures at global scale. On the largest centralized and decentralized platforms in the world, Binance and Hyperliquid, USDC's position has continued to strengthen, reaching 40% of open interest collateral in these markets. And there is a real shift happening in what people are trading. The market is moving away from speculating on cryptocurrencies and into open global digital asset markets that support trading tokenized stocks, tokenized commodities, and other tokenized assets. In fact, for the first time, the majority of traded volume on Hyperliquid, one of the most important venues in the world, is now in real-world assets rather than digital commodities and cryptocurrencies, reaching nearly 75% of PERP's volume as of last week. This is a major change in the structure of the market, and Circle is very well positioned as the leading provider of stablecoin infrastructure to these markets. We are also seeing dramatic growth in prediction markets as a major source of digital asset trading activity. Spot volume on PolyMarket grew more than 8x year-over-year, and open interest posted in these markets grew more than 4x year-over-year. PolyMarket is a strategic distribution partner for USDC, which underpins this activity. Now let me turn to ARK. ARK is coming, and we are excited to announce today that ARK Mainnet will launch this quarter on September 16th. We have seen tremendous traction as the infrastructure gets ready for this moment. Our testnet has processed more than half a billion transactions across nearly 3 million wallets with nearly perfect uptime. And more than 100 partners are already active on our private mainnet, preparing for the public launch. Thank you for joining us. This includes the world's leading asset manager, the world's leading equities and securities clearing firm, leading digital asset firms, the largest exchange group in the world, the two largest retail payments networks in the world, leading banks from around the world, and leading payment processors and remittance companies. This is an incredible group running infrastructure that others can build on. No other blockchain has been built with this kind of strength. It is an amazing milestone and we are thrilled for the launch in the coming weeks. Alongside the Mainnet launch, we are announcing two major partnerships today. The first is with DTCC. DTCC underpins so much of our equities and securities markets today. And DTCC is collaborating with Circle to bring tokenized securities to ARK, focusing first on enabling the tokenization of DTC-custodied assets on ARK. Over time, this extends to broader capabilities, tokenized repo, collateral mobility, corporate actions, securities lending, dividend distribution, and participant reporting. This reflects ARK's infrastructure model, purpose-built for financial institutions with deterministic settlement finality, configurable privacy, and a network operated by financial infrastructure companies. DTCC will participate in running the ARC Layer 1 network and DTC tokenized assets will carry the same protections, rights, and safeguards that investors receive with traditionally held assets. The second partnership is with BlackRock, who plans to deploy Biddle on ARK to leverage our infrastructure with native USDC integration. This enables institutional investors to subscribe, redeem, and deploy fund assets within a single on-chain environment, removing friction that has historically limited tokenized funded option at scale. Institutional fund management meets a network built for financial markets and stablecoin native settlement. We could not be more excited about these two partnerships. Turning to payments, we continue to see tremendous progress with CPN. At the end of Q2, annualized total payment volume reached nearly $15 billion on a trailing 30-day basis. That is tremendous growth on a year-over-year basis and on a quarter-over-quarter basis. We continued to enroll new financial institutions into the network, with nearly 30% quarter-over-quarter growth, reaching 175 financial institutions. And the momentum has continued. Sitting here today, as of July 31st, annualized total payment volume on a trailing 30-day basis has already reached $23 billion, representing 130% growth since our last earnings report. Alongside this growth, we are making major progress in product and market expansion. CPN and our related payments products are rolling out across international markets and now reach more than 58 countries. Our core operations infrastructure is enabling much more seamless onboarding for financial institutions with stronger operational tooling. And all of this is being integrated across our full stack, including ARK, Circle Mint, and our new StableFX venue. We're incredibly excited about this progress, and we're excited about beginning to monetize CPN. I want to close the product discussion with agentic finance, where we are seeing emerging traction with Circle's agent stack, In the coming days, we will be publishing a white paper and our near-term roadmap for the agentic economy. We are moving from a world where blockchains, stablecoins, and digital wallets are the rails that agents can pay with to a world where agents can earn and monetize. Already today, the USDC network, alongside payment protocols like X402, handles 99.3% of agentic payments. More than 900 paid services are already available in our agent marketplace. As we go forward, we see a world where more and more agents conduct work, and a labor market emerges for those agents. A developer can build and deploy an agent in minutes. That agent has its own identity. It can be discovered easily by other agents, and agents can monetize their services directly on chain. Reputation, trust, and discovery are all critical to how the agent economy will evolve, and we are excited to lay out our roadmap for building and delivering this in the second half of this year. Our work on agentic infrastructure is also unfolding inside of Circle. We are building toward operating an agentic corporation. In the first half of this year, we proved adoption at scale. 86% of our employees are weekly active users of AI tools. Our employees have shipped more than 1,100 AI apps this year, most of them over the course of Q2, and most by non-technical builders. Hundreds of agent skills have been published into an integrated Circle AI toolkit available across the company, and we now have continuous agent-run software development, with product development velocity up several hundred percent over the first half of the year. In the second half, we are moving from adoption at scale to orchestration at scale. We are standing up infrastructure where hybrid teams of agents and humans operate, working together as one. Underneath that will sit a company brain with memory and orchestration between humans and AIs and between AIs and other AIs connected by a messaging layer. On top of that, we are rolling out agent authoring tools to every employee in every team on a self-service basis so they can build individual and cross-functional agents with highly skilled capabilities across nearly every domain in the company. and underneath it all, we're building model infrastructure that lets us optimize across any model for performance, cost and capability. All of this is bound by a robust policy, security, governance and risk layer appropriate to a global financial infrastructure company like Circle. This is a transformation in how we operate, how we build, and how we deliver. We talk about the agentic economy and the emergence of on-chain agentic corporations. That is exactly what we are building here at Circle, and we are incredibly excited about what this will enable over time. I want to conclude with where I started. This is a global moment for digital dollars. Stablecoins are becoming federally regulated digital dollar money, and the world's leading financial institutions, technology companies, and enterprises are moving onto this infrastructure. Circle enters this moment from a position of extraordinary strength. We operate the largest, most liquid, most widely regulated stablecoin network in the world. We have renewed and deepened our most important partnerships and the greatest firms in the world are joining us as network participants, as validators on ARK, and as builders on our platform. We are launching ArcMainnet in a matter of weeks with a cohort of network validators no other network can match. And we're building the infrastructure for the agentic economy while becoming an agentic corporation ourselves. It's an incredibly exciting time to be building here at Circle, and we are thrilled with the progress we made this past quarter. With that, let me turn it over to Jeremy Fox-Geen, our CFO, to take you through the financial results.

Thank you Jeremy and good morning everyone. I'll start with a few observations that provide context for the quarter before turning to the financial results. First, as Jeremy mentioned earlier, USDC reached nearly 70% of stablecoin transaction volume in June, up from 36% in Q2 last year, reflecting the strength of our network and the trust that we've built across the ecosystem. Second, USDC circulation has remained resilient. While the broader digital asset market capitalization declined approximately 40% year over year, leading to reductions in trading activity, DeFi, collateral demand, and associated market maker balances, USDC circulation grew 19% over the same period, underscoring the decoupling of USDC usage from the vagaries of the digital asset markets. The resilience of USDC through that market cycle and signposting the underlying growth in non-crypto market adoption and usage. Those are the massive markets we're building for. And third, we continue to expand our infrastructure and application layers with strong growth in CPN, the upcoming launch of ARK and the approval of our National Trust Bank. These are important proof points that our strategy is taking shape. So with that context, I'll walk you through the financial results. USDC circulation ended the quarter at $73.3 billion, up 19% year over year. While ending circulation moderated at quarter end, average USDC circulation reached an all-time high of $76.5 billion in the quarter. USDC held within Circle's platform infrastructure increased 106% year-over-year to $12.4 billion, representing 17% of circulation. USDC on Coinbase's platform reached 30% at quarter-end, with Hyperliquid accounting for approximately 6% of that total. The reserve return rate was 3.48% for the quarter, down 66 basis points year-on-year, reflecting the decline in SOFA during the period. Total revenue and reserve income was $701 million in the quarter, up 7% year over year, as growth from circulation and other revenue was partially offset by lower reserve return rate during the period. Sequentially, total revenue and reserve income increased as average circulation hit an all-time high, but was partially offset by lower rates and other revenues. Other revenue was $34 million, up 1.4 times year over year, driven by growth in blockchain partnerships. Quarter over quarter, other revenue declined by $8 million, reflecting both moderating blockchain revenue amid weak digital asset market conditions and our deliberate decision to prioritize ARK over other blockchain partnerships. Subscription and services revenue declined $7 million, driven by fewer blockchain integrations. Transaction revenue declined by $1 million due to declining validator rewards. Revenue-less distribution cost margin was 41.2%, up 3 percentage points year over year, driven by our strategy to increase USDC held on our platform and grow high-margin other revenue streams. Quarter over quarter, margin decreased 21 basis points, with strong platform execution and mix optimization partially offsetting the impact of lower other revenue. The new hyperliquid arrangement for USDC had minimal impact on Q2 results, as the migration to coins platform ramp laid in the quarter. We expect that impact to be reflected beginning in Q3. Total revenue and reserve income, less distribution, transaction and other costs grew 15% year-over-year to $289 million. Adjusted operating expenses were $146 million, up 23% year-over-year, driven by continued investment in product development, go-to-market infrastructure, and our AI capabilities. Sequentially, adjusted operating expenses increased $11 million in the quarter, or 8%, as we continue to execute against our strategy. The expenses were driven by ARK marketing spend, continued infrastructure expansion, and investments in G&A. Adjusted EBITDA grew 8% year over year to $143 million. An adjusted EBITDA margin was 50% in the quarter. Now before turning to guidance, I want to start by addressing a question we've received around our multi-year through-cycle USDC growth framework. As we've said before, we are building infrastructure for the next generation of the financial system, and we continue to see structural shifts taking place across regulation, international adoption, enterprise use cases, agentic finance, and the broader acceptance of digital assets and blockchain technology. Thank you for watching. Given the magnitude of these structural shifts, our own historic growth patterns, and the potential for rapid scaling characteristic of internet platform companies, we believe that a 40% growth CAGR over several years through cycle is achievable. And when we look across third-party research, they project the stablecoin market for 2030 to be between approximately $1-4 trillion, implying compound annual growth rates of 27-77%. We expect that this growth will come from the massive regulated markets that make up the global economy, and that the vast majority of institutions, enterprises, and platforms will choose to build on compliant, regulated digital dollar infrastructure. We note that our own 40% target is well within this range. Now with that context, let me turn to the remaining components of our guidance, beginning with other revenue. We are raising our other revenue guidance range to $310 to $330 million, up from $150 to $170 million. The increase is driven by ARC. When we set the original range, we took a conservative view on contribution from new products. We are pleased that ARK in particular has been so successful and that we have been able to create a $3 billion asset even before Mainnet launch and execute a successful $242 million presale of the ARK token in Q2. We expect to recognize this token presale revenue as certain product milestones are achieved. Based on our product roadmap, we expect to achieve approximately 75% of the milestones in revenue in 2026 and have included $180 million in the revised guide. As this revenue is recognized, it will flow directly to the bottom line. Turning to RLDC Margin We are increasing our full-year outlook range to 41.7% to 43.7% from 38% to 40%, reflecting our prior guidance range augmented by the addition of anticipated revenue from ARC. Excluding that ARC revenue, we expect full-year RLDC margin to come in near the midpoint of the prior range. Finally, turning to adjusted operating expenses. Our guidance range of $570 to $585 million remains unchanged, although we expect to land at the higher end of that range. Given the strength of our balance sheet and the very attractive long-term returns we expect from investing behind our platform, we believe that now is the right time to sustain this investment. As Jeremy mentioned, this is the moment Circle has been building toward. Our financial foundation is strong, our network is growing, and in just a few weeks, on September 16th, we will launch ARK Mainnet with a cohort of network validators no other blockchain network can match. At the same time, we're building out the infrastructure for the agentic economy, positioning Circle at the center of how value will move in an AI-driven world. The opportunity ahead remains large, and we could not be more excited about the rest of this year and beyond. Now with that, I'll turn it back over to Scott to start the Q&A.