Cathie Wood has again directed her criticism at Wall Street’s “old-school” analysts. Her core argument is pretty blunt: analysts who spend their days building models around Visa and Mastercard simply can’t grasp Circle’s disruptive potential—despite the fact that the company has quietly risen 84% since going public.
This sounds like a podium pitch, but the logic chain is actually quite clear.
#Circle is who? It’s the issuer of the
#USDC stablecoin.
$USDC is not a typical crypto asset; it’s a “on-chain dollar” that’s 1:1 pegged to the U.S. dollar. What Circle is really selling isn’t the coin itself, but a *blockchain-based payments infrastructure*—money can move within seconds, across borders, with near-zero friction, bypassing the old systems of layered clearing, exchange-rate add-ons, and T+2 settlement used by traditional card networks.
In Cathie Wood’s view, this is the real “dimensionality reduction” attack. Even if Visa
$V and
#Mastercard are strong, they’re still built on a banking network that’s taken decades to accumulate. Circle’s underlying logic is code and smart contracts; its marginal cost trends toward zero, and expansion doesn’t rely on a stack of physical cards or rows of POS terminals. So she believes that when traditional analysts try to map Circle using the framework of “transaction volume × fee rate × market share,” they’re essentially using an abacus to measure cloud computing—mismatched dimensions.
The pain point she highlights is crucial: traditional financial analysis frameworks can’t evaluate the disruptive value of new types of infrastructure. Analysts are good at linear extrapolation—how much profit last year, how much growth this year, and a PEG. But Circle’s story isn’t simply “taking existing Visa market share.” It’s “redefining how money moves.” This kind of nonlinear, platform-level narrative often ends up in Excel with just one undervalued forward assumption. By the time the market catches up, the stock price has already moved ahead—hence the 84% surge.
Circle
$CRCLB also has vulnerabilities on the table: it is highly dependent on the size of USDC and the interest-rate environment. If regulation tightens or if USDC de-pegs, the story immediately changes. Moreover, “disrupting Visa” is more potential than reality right now—
#Visa itself is also embracing stablecoins and tokenized settlement, and traditional networks aren’t exactly lying down to be killed off