Last Thursday evening, #Circle officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with $USDC (having a market share of about 25%), the second-largest stablecoin in the world, at an initial price of $31 per share. Circle triggered circuit breakers several times during trading, closing its first day of listing up 168.48% at $83.23, with a market capitalization exceeding $18.5 billion, and continued to rise nearly 30% the following day.
Currently, the total market capitalization of global stablecoins has exceeded $250 billion, with USDT and USDC together holding 86% of the market share. This is why Circle has repeatedly adjusted the opening pricing before the IPO, as the market was hotter than expected.
Due to Circle's listing on the New York Stock Exchange, the concept of "stablecoin" has made headlines in financial news for several days, and to some extent, has allowed more traditional financial professionals to re-recognize the value of stablecoins.
Moreover, around the same day, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region officially announced that August 1, 2025, would be the implementation date for "stablecoin regulation," which increased the heat of stablecoins in the financial market. The American stablecoin bill GENIUS is also on the way, and everything seems to be perfectly aligned.
We won't discuss the value of stablecoins too much here. After experiencing explosive growth in recent years, if someone still denies their importance, it may be necessary to rethink and adjust their perception, just like saying "BTC is worthless" now.
Going back nearly four years to the same period, during the previous bull market cycle, the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in the U.S., Coinbase, successfully went public on Nasdaq, where its share price once rose to $429 and its market capitalization exceeded $112 billion, bringing hundreds of times returns to many early investment institutions.
However, it then entered a correction period of over two years, and its performance in the months following the listing faced criticism, even being described as a "junk company." But due to the successful listing of Coinbase, traditional financial markets saw another emerging financial market rising, leading to the current BTC ETFs and various reserve assets.
Similarly, for Circle's listing, its significance lies in bringing stablecoins, which were previously known only by a certain group of people, truly to the "big stage" and gaining favor from some old money. After all, if it only remains in the view of a small group of people, it will be difficult to enter the mainstream world, especially by showcasing its financial capabilities and company transparency through the listing, which is critical for the development of stablecoins.
As Jeremy Allaire, co-founder of Circle, said in an interview with Bloomberg: "The IPO will bring more trust, compliance, and transparency to Circle's regulated stablecoin network and help establish collaboration with other financial institutions."
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a form of "untrustworthy currency" and created BTC, ideally using this new form of currency to confront financial institutions that issue currency arbitrarily. However, today BTC is no longer able to function effectively as a means of payment due to various constraints, which is why stablecoins have developed rapidly.
In a way, stablecoins have replaced part of Nakamoto's idealism, of course only "in form," as stablecoins have returned to institutional logic, merely borrowing their technical form, but we cannot deny their value based on this point.
a16z_Crypto indicated in its latest report that in the past 12 months, the transaction volume of stablecoins reached $33 trillion, continuing to achieve new historical record figures, nearly 20 times the transaction volume of PayPal and nearly 3 times the transaction volume of Visa.
Some may feel that the current market size of stablecoins is not small, but compared to the traditional payment market size of tens of trillions of dollars, it still seems a bit "naive." However, if stablecoins can become a single market exceeding a trillion dollars in the next 3-5 years, they may only be just passing through the initial stage.
Thus, Circle's listing is akin to a small celebration of the "naming" of stablecoins, and the grand show after the celebration is just beginning. As the most mature application in the cryptocurrency industry aside from trading, stablecoins may be the real key to bringing Web3 and Crypto applications to thousands of homes, rather than the early NFT craze.
For investors and entrepreneurs, there are also many opportunities during this period. After all, making money with money is always a good business. If one cannot be a money creator, at least they can be a service provider in this field. Everything is just beginning, coexisting with risks and opportunities.
So, what will Circle's market value be in four years?
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