Circle now has institutions take BTC as collateral to borrow USDC—getting liquidity without selling. This product line fills a very specific gap: last week, Strategy just spent $75 million to buy BTC; Bitmine bought $75 million worth of ETH on the same day; and Tom Lee is still saying that institutional allocations to crypto remain too low. These institutions hold the coins, but they don’t want to recognize a sale on their financial statements, and they still need cash flow. In effect, Circle turns the BTC in custody into a credit facility. I’ve been watching the USDC trading volume for a while—the 24-hour figure of $3.8 billion has already topped the chart, higher than BTC’s $2.8 billion. If this lending product really takes off, USDC demand on the demand side would expand another layer, from trade settlement into collateralized credit. On the custody structure, I haven’t figured it out yet—whose balance sheet does the pledged BTC actually count as an asset and liability?