By Circle's Wild Year: An IPO, a Bank Charter, and a New Rival
Circle, the company behind USDC, has had about the most eventful run any stablecoin issuer has had. It went public, its stock did something close to a rollercoaster, it landed a rare piece of regulatory approval, and then a group of 140-plus companies showed up to compete directly with it. Here's the timeline.
The IPO
Circle listed on the NYSE under the ticker CRCL on June 5, 2025, pricing its IPO at $31 a share. Shares opened at $69 and hit an intraday high above $100 on day one alone, before climbing to a record around $300 later that same month. That's a lot of enthusiasm for a company whose entire business is, at its core, holding dollars and issuing a digital token backed by them.
The enthusiasm didn't last at that level. By May 2026, the stock had fallen roughly 62 percent from its peak, trading closer to $113, still a solid multiple of the original IPO price but a long way down from the June 2025 high. Markets, it turns out, priced in a lot of growth up front and spent the following year figuring out how much of it was actually realistic.
USDC kept growing even while the stock fell
Circulating USDC supply told a steadier story than the share price: roughly $61 billion at the time of the IPO, up to around $73 billion by mid-2026, real growth in actual usage even as CRCL stock had a rough year. Stock price and the underlying business aren't always moving together, and this was a pretty clean example of that.
Then Circle became a bank, sort of
On July 10, 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency approved Circle's application for a national trust bank charter, making it the first stablecoin issuer to hold one. The charter lets Circle directly custody reserve assets and operate across state lines under a single federal framework rather than a patchwork of state money-transmitter licenses, and the market liked it: shares jumped double digits the day the news broke.
This isn't a full banking license in the sense of taking consumer deposits or making loans. It's a trust charter, narrower in scope, but it's still a meaningful regulatory moat: it puts Circle under a single federal regulator instead of dozens of separate state ones, and gives it institutional custody capabilities most competitors don't have.
The same month, a rival showed up
In June 2026, a consortium describing itself as more than 140 businesses, including Stripe, Visa, BlackRock, Coinbase, and Mastercard, announced a new stablecoin called Open USD (OUSD), explicitly positioned to challenge the USDT and USDC duopoly. Tether and Circle itself are notably not part of it. The structure is different too: rather than one company keeping the yield earned on reserves, OUSD is designed to distribute most of that revenue back to participating members.
The announcement alone moved markets. CRCL shares dropped somewhere in the 16 to 17 percent range in the days after, a fair indication of how seriously investors took a coalition that size entering the space.
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Try the key collider nowWhere that leaves things
Tether's USDT is still the largest stablecoin by a wide margin. USDC is a clear second, now with a genuine regulatory edge from the bank charter. And OUSD is a serious, well-capitalized new entrant with a different revenue model, backed by companies most of the market already trusts. For the basics on how stablecoins work in the first place, see what a stablecoin actually is.
This is a summary of publicly reported events, not investment advice or commentary on CRCL stock. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any security.