Authored by: Circle
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
In 2025, stablecoins were the undisputed protagonists of the crypto world. As the year draws to a close, Circle, one of the key drivers behind the stablecoin wave, has released its annual review report. Circle elaborates in detail on the achievements of building its full-stack platform over the past year, from regulatory breakthroughs and stablecoin market share growth to application deployment and exploration of Arc infrastructure, presenting the evolution of programmable finance integrating into the mainstream world. Below are the core takeaways from the report.
TL;TR
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The enactment of the U.S. GENIUS Act, the EU's MiCA, and other global regulatory frameworks established the mainstream financial positioning of fully-reserved stablecoins, laying the foundation for industry scaling.
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In 2025, Circle completed the construction of its full-stack platform, combining trusted digital assets (USDC, EURC, USYC), real-world applications, and the Arc blockchain, serving as the economic operating system for the internet.
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Breakthroughs in institutional commercialization partnerships, covering giants like Intercontinental Exchange, Deutsche Börse, Finastra, and FIS, with applications spanning core areas of payments, clearing, and treasury management.
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Practical value realization of digital assets, extending from cross-border remittances and global payroll to AI agent payments, with the Arc blockchain public testnet launch supporting next-generation finance.
Circle has always believed that the global economic infrastructure should possess the speed and scale of the internet, allowing value to flow as seamlessly as information. Since its inception, our mission has been to enhance global economic prosperity through frictionless value exchange, committed to building open, programmable, vertically integrated financial service technology solutions that enable trusted digital currencies and financial applications to operate natively on the internet.
In 2025, this vision became clearer. New regulatory frameworks were enacted or fully implemented in multiple jurisdictions including the U.S., Europe, Canada, Hong Kong China, and the UAE, explicitly recognizing fully-reserved, value-stable, on-chain settlement digital currencies as components of the global financial system. Against this backdrop, Circle's IPO became a milestone in its development, solidifying its long-term commitment to transparency, sound governance, and rigorous risk management.
Our strategy rests on three synergistic pillars, advanced throughout 2025: first, fully-reserved digital stablecoins (USDC, EURC, and USYC); second, a matrix of application services (including Circle Payments Network, StableFX); and third, the launch of the Arc blockchain, integrating programmable money with real-world economic activity to create a neutral, institutional-grade infrastructure. These three form a full-stack technology platform, propelling programmable money and on-chain transactions into the mainstream of global finance.
Our efforts aim to create tangible value: low-cost, fast remittances help families retain more income; efficient cross-border payments benefit small and micro-enterprises; programmable funds empower financial institutions to manage liquidity in real-time and explore new markets, driving the financial system's transformation towards an open, inclusive, internet-native form. This annual report focuses on the key pillars of transformation in 2025, covering four core areas: regulatory milestones, digital asset growth, application service expansion, and Arc infrastructure exploration.
Regulatory Clarity: Unlocking Industry Scaling Potential
2025 was a turning point for the industry with regulatory breakthroughs in multiple jurisdictions worldwide. Key markets like the U.S., EU, Hong Kong China, and the UAE introduced frameworks that clearly positioned "fully-reserved, value-stable, transparent, and traceable" on-chain settlement digital currencies as long-term components of the financial system, reversing policy uncertainty.
Critical progress was made in the U.S. market. The GENIUS Act came into effect in July, defining fully-reserved payment stablecoins as core components of modern financial infrastructure, with条款 (clauses) highly aligned with Circle's standards. Concurrently, Circle received conditional approval from the OCC to establish a "First National Digital Currency Bank," which will strengthen USDC reserve security and regulatory transparency in the future, filling the gap between traditional finance and digital asset services.
The trend of regulatory coordination was global. In the EU market, Circle is the only major issuer with both MiCA-compliant USDC and EURC, covering all 27 EU member states; in the Middle East, the DFSA listed USDC/EURC among the first compliant stablecoins, and Circle obtained a full FSP license in Abu Dhabi, expanding application scenarios in the UAE.
Compliance capability became a core advantage. Circle joined the global Travel Rule network, deepened collaboration with the TRUST network, and embedded compliance functions into products like CPN and Gateway, reducing customer integration costs.
Meanwhile, industry participants have been evaluating how to integrate USDC more deeply into their products and services, and the overall positive regulatory environment for digital assets has also driven demand growth for EURC and USYC. These developments mark the beginning of a structural shift in the financial system, viewing digital assets as scalable, mainstream, and resilient cash equivalents.
Commercial Expansion: Institutional Partnerships Penetrate Core Financial Scenarios
Regulatory clarity catalyzed explosive growth in institutional business in 2025. Global market infrastructure providers, fintech companies, and exchanges纷纷 (successively) partnered with Circle, validating the value of digital assets in improving efficiency and reducing risk.
The entry of top-tier market infrastructure providers became a bellwether. The U.S. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced the introduction of USDC/USYC, exploring integration into capital market trading and clearing processes; the EU's Deutsche Börse committed to integrating USDC/EURC into its full流程 (process), reducing settlement risk.
Fintech giants accelerated integration. Finastra plans to integrate USDC settlement into its Global PAYplus platform, which handles trillions of dollars in cross-border funds daily; FIS incorporated USDC into its "Funds Flow Hub," benefiting a vast number of bank customers; Intuit signed a multi-year strategic partnership to deploy stablecoin infrastructure covering treasury management for small and micro-enterprises.
Breakthroughs were made in cross-border payments and regional markets. In Brazil, Circle partnered with Matera to empower enterprises with low-cost global payments; in the Asia-Pacific region, collaboration with LianLian Global explored optimization of cross-border collections for small, micro, and medium enterprises (SMMEs); in Europe, the subsidiary of Bank Bison launched USDC/EURC deposit and withdrawal services. Among payment card networks, Visa U.S. launched USDC real-time settlement, and Mastercard expanded its services to the EMEA region.
Exchange ecosystem cooperation deepened. Binance supports USYC as derivatives collateral, expanding USDC application coverage to 240 million users; Bybit, Kraken, and OKX enhanced liquidity, accelerated integration, and launched two-way conversion services respectively. Regarding infrastructure布局 (layout), Circle acquired Interop to accelerate Arc and CCTP progress; acquired Hashnote to incorporate USYC into Circle's full-stack platform; partnered with Safe to build multi-signature smart accounts; and布局 (laid groundwork for) AI agent payment standards.
Digital Assets: Building Core Value Carriers for Global Finance
In 2025, the three core digital assets, USDC, EURC, and USYC, achieved dual improvement in scale and quality, covering diverse scenarios such as payments, foreign exchange, and treasury management.
USDC: Global Stablecoin Benchmark
As of December 23, 2025, USDC's market capitalization rose from $44 billion to $77 billion, a 75% growth. On-chain coverage expanded to 30 blockchains, adding 14 new public chains including XRP Ledger. After the CCTP protocol upgrade, it supports cross-chain transfers across 17 chains, with cumulative transaction volume exceeding $126 billion and over 6 million transfers.
Market liquidity improved significantly over the past year. Binance's BTC/USDC spot liquidity grew by 227%, and perpetual contract depth increased by over 200%. Trading metrics optimized, with spreads below 1 basis point 99% of the time, and slippage for a $100,000 trade decreased from 42 basis points to less than 5 basis points, gradually narrowing the gap with USDT and becoming a highly credible liquidity carrier.
EURC: Leading the EU Compliant Market
2025 was also a crucial year for EURC. The implementation of MiCA drove explosive growth for EURC. As of December 23, its market cap surged from €70 million to over €300 million, a 328% increase, firmly securing the top position among euro stablecoins.
EURC's growth benefited from its expansion onto World Chain. World Chain brought EURC to over 37 million World App users, enabling the buying, selling, and transferring of euros for everyday transactions.
The "regulatory compliance + institutional on/off-ramps + consumer-grade distribution" model formed a regional liquidity network complementary to USDC, validating the feasibility of the regionalization strategy.
USYC: Core Choice for Institutional Yield-Bearing Assets
Like USDC and EURC, Circle's TMMF (Tokenized Money Market Fund) USYC also continued to grow. Between November 1, 2025, and December 23, USYC's Assets Under Management (AUM) increased by approximately $592 million, from $948 million to $1.54 billion, becoming the world's second-largest TMMF.
USYC successfully launched on BNB Chain and Solana, reaching more institutional clients leveraging high throughput and low latency characteristics. Its core value lies in "traditional asset yield + flexible on-chain settlement," supporting 24/7 redemption conversion to USDC, meeting institutional liquidity needs.
Applications & Services: Bridging the Last Mile to Adoption
As regulated digital assets continued to grow stronger in 2025, the focus shifted to making these assets more applicable to real-world financial workflows. Circle's CPN (Circle Payments Network), CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol), Gateway, Circle xReserve, Mint, StableFX, Circle Wallets, and other supporting applications and services have become the link connecting digital assets to everyday financial infrastructure.
CPN: Accelerating Global Fund Flows
Addressing pain points in traditional cross-border payments like T+2 to T+5 delays and high fees of 3%-5%, Circle launched the CPN stablecoin payment network in early 2025. It is a coordination platform for licensed financial institutions to enable real-time payments. CPN's core advantages include: a "one-to-many" integration model reducing setup costs; a programmable risk control framework supporting real-time policy enforcement; and native compliance capabilities enabling "compliance as a service."
The CPN Console self-service interface shortened the onboarding cycle, with over 25 design partners by year-end. For example, Brazil's Alfred achieved second-level cross-border payments, reducing exchange rate costs by 20%; Asia-Pacific's Tazapay addressed the pain points of SMMEs receiving payments.
Liquidity & Interoperability Tools
As the use of digital assets in the real world continued to grow in 2025, Circle continued to expand the liquidity and interoperability foundations needed to support this growth.
Mint, Gateway, and xReserve协同 (synergistically) built a multi-chain liquidity system. Mint optimized fee rates and account management, adding 24/7 USDC/EURC exchange; Gateway supports 11 core chains, enabling real-time USDC allocation and integrating分散 (fragmented) liquidity; xReserve empowers the issuance of reserved-backed stablecoins on non-native chains, reducing cross-chain trust risks.
StableFX: Reimagining Institutional FX Trading
While Mint, CPN, CCTP, Gateway, and xReserve focus on payments, liquidity, and interoperability, StableFX and Circle Partner Stablecoins target another critical aspect of cross-border finance: foreign exchange.
Addressing pain points in traditional FX like T+1 settlement and advance margin payments, Circle launched the StableFX engine in November. Combining an RFQ (Request for Quote) model with on-chain settlement, it enables real-time delivery without margin requirements. StableFX is now live on the Arc public testnet.
Wallets & Autonomous Payments: Expanding AI Scenarios
Wallets are the way users interact with the on-chain world; this critical infrastructure brings together end-user experience, developer workflows, and emerging agent use cases.
Circle's wallet-as-a-service platform, Circle Wallets, launched a modular solution, with Gas Station and Paymaster features lowering user barriers. Circle also expanded wallet infrastructure into a new领域 (domain): autonomous machine-to-machine payments. Through partnerships with Coinbase's x402 protocol and collaborators like OpenMind, Circle integrated developer-controlled wallets with x402, enabling AI agents to use USDC for autonomous payments for API access, data, computation, and content fees.
Real-World Applications: From Pilot to Scale
The true measure of progress in 2025 was not the breadth of Circle's product portfolio or the rollout of clearer regulatory frameworks worldwide, but rather what developers and customers achieved as a result. In 2025, Circle's digital asset applications moved from pilot to scale, covering scenarios like consumer banking, cross-border remittances, and global payroll, solving pain points in traditional finance.
CAP Program: Alliance Ecosystem Drives Innovation
As of December, the CAP (Circle Alliance Program) membership reached 1,065, covering banks, tech companies, etc. Its core value lies in ecosystem synergy: Circle provides technical support, and members innovate based on local needs: Southeast Asian members reduced cross-border remittances to minutes and cut fees by 50%; Latin American members integrated into agricultural supply chain finance, serving small and medium farmers.
Mainstream Financial Channel Penetration: Reaching Hundreds of Millions of Users
Circle partnered with Latin American digital bank Nubank to provide low-threshold USDC savings services for 127 million users in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Users无需 (do not need) foreign accounts and can exchange for value preservation directly within their existing app. By integrating USDC into its platform, Nubank began offering tens of millions of Brazilians a convenient way to access and hold digital dollars within the Nubank application.
Cross-Border Payments & Remittances: From T+2 to 24/7
Global payment network Thunes replaced multi-currency pre-funding models with USDC, reducing working capital占用 (occupancy) by 30%, increasing reconciliation efficiency by 60%, and covering more emerging markets. On another front, neo-bank Lipaworld, based on stablecoins, combined USDC with digital vouchers to provide low-cost remittance services for immigrants, reducing fees by 40%-60% and shortening arrival time to minutes, solving the problem of insufficient outlets in underdeveloped regions.
Payroll: Adapting to Remote Work
Circle partnered with Rise and others to launch a USDC payroll solution. Companies can pay salaries globally through a single platform, avoiding multi-currency exchange costs, with arrival times shrinking from 3-5 days to real-time. Over a thousand companies benefited, covering industries like tech and creative sectors, improving income predictability for freelancers and reducing corporate operational costs.
Social Responsibility: Institutionalizing Financial Inclusion
While expanding its commercial and institutional footprint in 2025, Circle also took steps to formalize our long-standing commitment to financial inclusion and enhancing financial resilience.
Through the "Pledge 1%" program, the Circle Foundation was established, funding projects like mobile payment promotion in Africa, payment access for SMMEs in Southeast Asia, and financial literacy training for immigrants in Latin America. Inclusivity was incorporated into infrastructure design, with CPN expanding coverage in emerging markets and low-threshold APIs reducing costs for SMMEs.
Arc Blockchain: Launching the Internet's Economic OS
In 2025, Circle launched Arc, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 public chain positioned as the "Internet's Economic Operating System," specifically built to carry real-world financial activity. The acquisition of the Informal Systems team integrated the Malachite consensus engine, featuring sub-second confirmation, high throughput, and low energy consumption.
The Arc public testnet launched in October, attracting over 100 institutions to participate, including global core players like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Amazon Web Services, and Coinbase. Arc's core features include: sub-second finality, predictable fees denominated in USDC, and configurable privacy tools.
Exploration of AI scenarios yielded significant results. A hackathon spurred developer innovation, with an "AI Disaster Relief Platform" as a典型 (typical example), using Arc and USDC to enable automatic fund distribution, with zero-knowledge proofs ensuring compliance and transparency. As of December, Arc's Discord community exceeded 20,000 members. A developer fund was launched to资助 (fund) projects like compliance components and liquidity tools, accelerating ecosystem adoption.
Future Outlook: Co-building an Open Internet Financial System
The progress we made in 2025 is just the beginning. The world is still in the early stages of transitioning from financial infrastructure used for decades to an internet financial system where value exists natively online and flows at unprecedented speeds. The clarity of key market regulations, the growth and diversification of trusted digital assets, the expansion of applications with practical utility, and the early momentum of blockchain infrastructure built for real-world economic activity all indicate that programmable on-chain finance will play a foundational role in the global economy.
Moving forward, as a neutral issuer of trusted digital currency, a builder of institutional-grade infrastructure, and a partner to developers of next-generation financial applications, we are committed to continuing to play a constructive role.
