The Stablecoin IPO That Nearly Tripled on Day One
Published October 14, 2026
Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, went public on the New York Stock Exchange on June 5, 2025, pricing its shares at $31 and closing the day up 168% at $83.23 after raising nearly $1.1 billion. Co-founder Jeremy Allaire, who sold about 1.6 million shares in the offering while keeping roughly 18 million, saw his fortune jump past $1.7 billion on day one. It was the company's second attempt at going public, after a SPAC merger collapsed in late 2022.
On June 5, 2025, Circle Internet Group began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CRCL, and the market response was extraordinary. The company priced its initial public offering at $31 a share, already above a revised range of $27 to $28, raising nearly $1.1 billion. The stock opened at $69, climbed as high as $103.75 during the session, and closed up 168% at $83.23. About 46 million shares changed hands, far more than the number of freely floating shares available, and the company that had been valued at roughly $6.8 billion before trading opened was worth about $18.5 billion by the closing bell.
The debut was the payoff of a long, uneven climb. Circle was co-founded in 2013 by Jeremy Allaire, originally out of Boston, as a consumer-payments startup with crypto wallet and exchange services. In 2015 it became the first company to receive New York's notoriously hard-to-get BitLicense. As the market matured, Circle pivoted to its real prize: USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin that became the second-largest in the world. The company even moved its headquarters to New York ahead of the listing.
Going public had not been a foregone conclusion. Circle's first attempt, a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory headwinds and a brutal crypto downturn. The company spent the next two-plus years doing the unglamorous work its chief executive later described as the whole strategy: courting governments and policymakers, collecting licenses, and making the case that a stablecoin issuer could be a regulated financial institution.
The day-one winners started with Allaire himself. He sold roughly 1.6 million shares in the offering but kept about 18 million shares along with options and restricted stock units, and Bloomberg calculated his fortune at more than $1.7 billion after the first day of trading. Early employees, venture backers and institutional investors who bought the private rounds rode the same surge. For people who had been on the cap table since the lean years, the IPO was a decade of patience converted into liquidity in a single session.
The wider significance was bigger than one fortune. Circle joined an exclusive club of pure-play crypto companies listed in the United States, alongside Coinbase, eToro and the bitcoin miners, and analysts treated the debut as a watershed moment that could open public markets to other long-standing crypto firms. A strategist at 21Shares told DL News the performance would almost surely prompt other crypto companies to want to go public. It was a signal that the mainstreaming of digital assets would run through the companies that had done the compliance paperwork first.
The lesson is almost old-fashioned: endurance beat hype. Circle survived a collapsed SPAC, a crypto winter, and years of regulatory uncertainty by staying solvent and playing by the rules, and the market rewarded the survivors. In an industry famous for overnight riches and spectacular blowups, the biggest crypto IPO in years belonged to a company that spent a decade getting licensed, regulated and boring. Getting rich slowly is still getting rich — and it is a strategy that works in public.
The lesson: Endurance beats hype: Circle survived a collapsed SPAC and a crypto winter by staying regulated and solvent, and twelve years of patience became the decade's biggest crypto IPO.
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