Circle Internet (CRCL) shares gave back an early pop Wednesday, sliding roughly 3% before the bell. The catalyst: a second-quarter earnings beat that ran headlong into a revenue miss and a wave of new detail on institutional support for Arc, the company’s layer-1 blockchain.
Here are the numbers behind the mixed reaction. Adjusted earnings came in at 18 cents a share, two cents above consensus. Revenue plus reserve income totaled $701 million, up 7% year over year but below the $712 million analysts had modeled, according to CoinDesk. Net income from continuing operations hit $48 million versus a $43 million estimate. Adjusted EBITDA rose 8% year over year to $143 million.
CEO Jeremy Allaire set the results against a cooling rate environment and a crypto market that “has slowed.” Institutional clients, he argued, have moved past the pilot stage. “The institutions using USDC today, like BlackRock, BNY and Standard Chartered aren’t piloting, they are expanding,” Allaire said in a statement.
USDC circulation reached $73.3 billion at the end of June. That is up 19% from a year earlier, though it marks a pullback from a 2026 peak near $80 billion. Onchain transaction volume during the quarter surged to $14.8 trillion, a 151% jump year over year.
Arc’s public mainnet is scheduled to go live Sept. 16. More than 100 developer and institutional builders are already developing on the network. The founding validator set looks like a who’s who of finance: BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered, Galaxy and MoneyGram, along with other financial firms.
BlackRock intends to bring BUIDL, its tokenized U.S. Treasury fund, to Arc, the report said. DTCC, meanwhile, is building infrastructure to tokenize securities sitting in its depository.
On the payments side, Circle Payments Network logged $14.7 billion in annualized transaction volume over the trailing 30 days. That is a 76% increase from the prior quarter, with 175 financial institutions now participating. Circle also secured OCC approval to stand up Circle National Trust, a federal trust bank charter.
Why the premarket fade after an initial move higher? The revenue shortfall and the dip in USDC circulation appear to have spooked sentiment, even as the bottom line beat. Traders, as ever, disagree on which number matters most.
