Circle Q4 FY2025 Earnings: From $299 to $50 to a 29% Surge — The Stablecoin Stock That Refused to Die
Circle just reported $770 million in Q4 revenue, crushed Wall Street's earnings estimate by nearly 3x, and watched its stock rocket 29% in a single session. Not bad for a company that eight months ago was worth four times more than it is today.
The story of Circle's first year as a public company is the story of stablecoins themselves — the wild optimism, the brutal reality check, and the quiet infrastructure buildout that might actually justify the hype. Let's trace it from the beginning.
Act 1: The IPO That Set Crypto on Fire
June 2025. Circle prices its IPO at $31 per share on the New York Stock Exchange. It opens at $69. Within weeks, the stock screams past $200, then $250, then $299.
The thesis was irresistible: the first pure-play stablecoin company to go public, at the exact moment Washington was warming to crypto regulation. USDC was already the second-largest stablecoin in the world. Congress was debating stablecoin legislation. And here was the only way for traditional investors to bet directly on the thesis that dollar-pegged digital tokens would become the rails of global finance.
Wall Street couldn't buy it fast enough. At $299, Circle's market cap implied a company that had already won. The euphoria was total.
Act 2: The Reckoning
Then reality showed up.
By late 2025, the stock had begun its long descent. The bears had a simple argument: Circle is a spread business. It issues USDC, holds reserves in Treasury bills, and collects the yield. When rates go up, Circle prints money. When rates go down? You can guess.
There were other questions too. Tether's USDT still commanded roughly 70% of the stablecoin market despite its opacity. Could USDC really close the gap? And the cost structure — Circle was spending heavily to scale, with $424 million in stock-based compensation alone in FY2025 dragging the full-year bottom line to a net loss of $70 million.
By February 2026, Circle's stock had cratered to around $50. A company that once traded near $300 was now fighting for relevance in the mid-cap tier. The narrative had flipped completely: from "inevitable winner" to "overpriced spread trade."
And then came February 25th.
Act 3: The Earnings Beat That Changed the Story
Circle's Q4 numbers didn't just beat estimates — they demolished them.
Revenue hit $770 million, up 77% year-over-year. Earnings per share came in at $0.43, nearly triple the $0.16 consensus. Adjusted EBITDA surged to $167 million, a 412% increase from the same quarter last year. Net income was $133 million, turning what had been a money-losing year into a profitable closing act.
The stock surged 29% on the day.
For the full year, Circle generated $2.7 billion in revenue — a 64% jump from FY2024. The annual net loss of $70 million looks bad at first glance, but it's almost entirely explained by that $424 million SBC charge, a one-time artifact of going public. Strip it out, and the underlying business generated $582 million in adjusted EBITDA, more than double the prior year.
But the numbers that really matter aren't on the income statement.
The USDC Machine
USDC in circulation hit $75.3 billion by the end of Q4 — up 72% year-over-year. More importantly, on-chain transaction volume exploded to $11.9 trillion, a 247% increase. That's not people holding USDC in wallets hoping it goes up. That's commerce. Payments. Settlement. The stuff that actually makes a stablecoin valuable.
Circle's share of the stablecoin market climbed to 28%, steadily closing the gap with Tether. And unlike Tether, every dollar behind USDC is audited, reserved in Treasuries and cash, and fully transparent. In a world moving toward regulation, that distinction is starting to matter a lot.
| Metric | Q4 FY2025 | Q4 FY2024 | YoY Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $770M | $435M | +77% |
| Net Income | $133M | ($9M) | N/A |
| EPS | $0.43 | N/A | vs $0.16 est |
| Adj. EBITDA | $167M | $33M | +412% |
| USDC Circulation | $75.3B | $43.8B | +72% |
| On-Chain Volume | $11.9T | $3.4T | +247% |
Beyond the Dollar Peg
Here's where the Circle story gets genuinely interesting — and where the bears might be wrong.
If Circle were just a stablecoin issuer collecting Treasury yields, the spread-business critique would be fatal. Rates fall, revenue falls, game over. But the company is building something else entirely.
Circle Payments Network launched with 55 financial institutions at the table. This isn't theoretical — it's a real-time settlement network designed to compete with SWIFT for cross-border payments. If even a fraction of the $150 trillion annual cross-border flow migrates to blockchain rails, the revenue opportunity dwarfs interest income.
The Arc blockchain gives Circle its own programmable infrastructure layer. Visa is settling transactions in USDC. Intuit integrated USDC for business payments. And perhaps most importantly, the OCC issued Circle a banking charter — the first for a crypto-native company — giving it the regulatory moat that could keep competitors locked out for years.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has been saying for a while that the company's future isn't in being an "issuer" but in being "financial infrastructure." After this quarter, the market is starting to believe him.
Tracking Circle's Finances in Plain Text
To verify every number in this analysis, we built Circle's full FY2024–FY2025 financial statements in Beancount, the open-source double-entry accounting system. Here's what the blowout Q4 looks like as plain-text transactions:
2025-12-30 * "Q4 Revenue"
Assets:TotalAssets 770 USD
Income:Revenue
2025-12-30 * "Q4 Cost of Revenue"
Expenses:CostOfRevenue 312 USD
Assets:TotalAssets
2025-12-30 * "Q4 General and Administrative"
Expenses:GeneralAndAdministrative 119 USD
Assets:TotalAssets
2025-12-30 * "Q4 Net Income"
Assets:TotalAssets 133 USD
Income:NetIncome
Every figure cross-references Circle's SEC filings. Explore the full interactive ledger below:
What Comes Next
Wall Street is bullish. The consensus rating is Buy, with an average price target of $131.69 — roughly 80% upside from today's levels. Bernstein projects USDC circulation could hit $220 billion by 2027, and Circle's own guidance calls for 40% compound annual growth in USDC supply.
The stablecoin legislation working through Congress could be the biggest catalyst of all. If the U.S. passes a clear regulatory framework — and most observers expect it will — Circle is positioned better than anyone. It already has the banking charter, the compliance infrastructure, and the institutional relationships. Tether, operating from offshore with limited transparency, would face a much harder road.
But risks remain. Interest rates are the obvious one — if the Fed cuts aggressively, Circle's reserve income shrinks. Competition from banks issuing their own stablecoins is another. And the stock-based compensation is real; that $424 million charge reflects dilution that existing shareholders are eating.
The Verdict
Eight months ago, buying Circle at $299 looked like genius. By the time it hit $50, it looked like a disaster. Today, after a 29% surge on the back of numbers that silenced every bear on the Street, it looks like something in between — a company that got way ahead of itself, came back to earth, and is now proving that the underlying business might actually be worth the excitement.
Circle isn't just a stablecoin company anymore. It's becoming the financial plumbing for a blockchain-native economy. Whether the stock at $73 is cheap or expensive depends entirely on whether you believe that economy is coming.
After today's earnings, more people believe it than yesterday.
