#circle上半年营收约14亿美元
$150 billion in a quarter is just a warm-up for stablecoins 🦖
📢 ⏰ 消息群里第一时间说
Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire and a16z’s Chris Dixon just had a conversation. The most striking thing wasn’t the valuation—it was that Circle minted and redeemed $150 billion in a single quarter. That pipeline is already connected to the global banking system.
First, let’s look at the scale of the business. Circle brought in about $1.4 billion in revenue in the first half of the year. Of that, $819 million went to partners and transaction costs, leaving just $473 million to reinvest. In other words, 58 cents of every dollar earned has to be paid out. Stablecoin issuance is no longer a money-printing machine—it’s a business that relies on scale to spread distribution costs.
So where’s the moat? Allaire pointed to three pillars: the utility and liquidity flywheel of the stablecoin network, regulated infrastructure, and CCTP interoperability. He said CCTP accounts for about half of cross-chain transfer value, reaching as high as 70% in recent quarters. Another part of the picture is the CPN payments network, which already has nearly 200 financial institutions on it.
More importantly, he shared his view of the future: the main users of this system will increasingly be machines, not people. Dixon said he used vibe coding to build a small app running on Arc. A week after launch, it was getting 15,000 visits a day, all from bots looking for environment variables, SSH credentials, and cryptocurrency. In his words: “The machines are already here” ⚠️
My take is that stablecoin competition has shifted from issuance volume to settlement rails and distribution. Whoever can get assets flowing through their own pipes gets the fees. Machine payments will make this market even bigger, because machines don’t care about brands—they care about cost and success rates. But the other side is clear, too: Arc’s validators are known and elected. That’s a compromise made for compliance. Between efficiency and decentralization, it has chosen the former 📈
One more thing: the conversation also mentioned that someone converted neural data from a real fly’s brain into about 16 MB of bytecode and ran it on Arc. It sounds like a joke, but it shows that people are already experimenting with completely different things on-chain—and nobody knows where the limits are.
What do you think: five years from now, will most on-chain transactions be initiated by people or by machines? Let’s talk in the comments 👀
Every day, I bring you the latest on stablecoins and AI—not just what’s happening, but the logic and opportunities behind the headlines 👀🚀
Tap the profile picture to watch the livestream
$150 billion in a quarter is just a warm-up for stablecoins 🦖
📢 ⏰ 消息群里第一时间说
Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire and a16z’s Chris Dixon just had a conversation. The most striking thing wasn’t the valuation—it was that Circle minted and redeemed $150 billion in a single quarter. That pipeline is already connected to the global banking system.
First, let’s look at the scale of the business. Circle brought in about $1.4 billion in revenue in the first half of the year. Of that, $819 million went to partners and transaction costs, leaving just $473 million to reinvest. In other words, 58 cents of every dollar earned has to be paid out. Stablecoin issuance is no longer a money-printing machine—it’s a business that relies on scale to spread distribution costs.
So where’s the moat? Allaire pointed to three pillars: the utility and liquidity flywheel of the stablecoin network, regulated infrastructure, and CCTP interoperability. He said CCTP accounts for about half of cross-chain transfer value, reaching as high as 70% in recent quarters. Another part of the picture is the CPN payments network, which already has nearly 200 financial institutions on it.
More importantly, he shared his view of the future: the main users of this system will increasingly be machines, not people. Dixon said he used vibe coding to build a small app running on Arc. A week after launch, it was getting 15,000 visits a day, all from bots looking for environment variables, SSH credentials, and cryptocurrency. In his words: “The machines are already here” ⚠️
My take is that stablecoin competition has shifted from issuance volume to settlement rails and distribution. Whoever can get assets flowing through their own pipes gets the fees. Machine payments will make this market even bigger, because machines don’t care about brands—they care about cost and success rates. But the other side is clear, too: Arc’s validators are known and elected. That’s a compromise made for compliance. Between efficiency and decentralization, it has chosen the former 📈
One more thing: the conversation also mentioned that someone converted neural data from a real fly’s brain into about 16 MB of bytecode and ran it on Arc. It sounds like a joke, but it shows that people are already experimenting with completely different things on-chain—and nobody knows where the limits are.
What do you think: five years from now, will most on-chain transactions be initiated by people or by machines? Let’s talk in the comments 👀
Every day, I bring you the latest on stablecoins and AI—not just what’s happening, but the logic and opportunities behind the headlines 👀🚀
Tap the profile picture to watch the livestream