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Stablecoins aren’t new, but they’ve become big business in recent years as companies and governments look to leverage the digital money—and regulate it. That’s helping to drive growth for specialists in the business.
And now one such company, Circle Internet Financial, claims it’s swallowing more and more share in this rapidly growing market, gains driven at least in part by agentic commerce, itself a relatively new technology that enables bits of code to comb through the Internet to transact on behalf of human users.
“An extraordinary transformation is under way. Tens or hundreds of billions of AI agents will interact over the Internet,” noted Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s chief executive, during a call early Wednesday to discuss his company’s December-quarter and full-year 2025 results. “This has [already] created extraordinary value over time. It will drive the greatest acceleration in financial systems in human history.”
That transformation is lending plenty of momentum to Circle, Allaire told equity analysts on a call early Wednesday held to present Circle’s quarterly results. “We are seeing an explosion of developer activity around AI and it’s becoming an important driver for Circle,” Allaire said. AI agents, with the support of blockchain systems, “are going to be the underpinning of the global economic system,” he predicted.
With the help of these billions of agents, “the impact for us is a major new demand driver for our stablecoin network,” said Allaire, as AI systems and blockchains work together. “It’s driving stablecoins out to new use cases.” And much of this momentum is very new, he added. “What we’ve seen in the last three to four weeks has been eye-opening.”
The explosion in AI agents comes as Circle works to bring a new cross-border network, Arc, onstream. “We’ve built the highway, and we can light up the highway for any asset issuer,” Allaire said. Once fully enabled, Arc will support transactions in USDC, Circle’s stablecoin. “What we see is many products that want to use USDC. As that happens that drives growth in USDC,” he said.
Circle recorded $75.3 billion in network volume for the December quarter, up 72%, while USDC clocked 247% growth in onchain volume, growing to $11.9 trillion in value. The Arc testnet now claims 166 million transactions since its launch, or 2.3 million on average each day. The Arc mainnet is expected to launch later this year. “We’ve built the highway. We can light up the highway for any asset issuer,” said Allaire.
The New York City-based company reported $770 million in revenue and reserve income for the quarter, rising 77% from a year ago. Net income came to $133 million, against $3 million a year ago.
