It may sound crazy now, as the stock is up nearly 4x from an already lofty IPO price, but Circle $CRCL is almost a perfect short.

Here are 5 reasons why👇

1) All its comps are juiced by periods of high rates and hockey stick adoption. Its competitors like Tether are generally considered to be more competent operators. Anecdotal, but crypto native users prefer USDT for whatever reason.

2) Its largest partners like Coinbase can easily replicate the platform. Coinbase has the technological capabilities already with its custody service. Why wouldn’t it launch its own stablecoin?

3) Circle isn’t a bank. Has no regulatory advantage. It simply relies on relationships with financial intermediaries like most other fintech companies. No special sauce.

4) Stablecoins aren’t useful for forex. Traditional digital payments networks already move money for basically free and in real time. Everybody loves to use the antiquated bank wire example, but there’s many modern alternatives that are cheaper and easier to use than crypto for payments.

5) Circle is essentially regulatory arbitrage. It has only gained traction because of its perceived compliance halo during a period of intense scrutiny of crypto transactions. But the trend now is completely different. Circle has no real moat there anymore.