段永平建仓Circle，他在赌什么？

Source: Fintech Blueprint

Compiled and edited by: BitpushNews

Yesterday, the U.S. SEC disclosed the latest quarterly 13F filing report. Duan Yongping, hailed as the "Chinese Warren Buffett," made a major portfolio shift in his family wealth and charitable fund account, H&H International Investment LLC, which he quietly manages and holds over $20 billion in assets — for the first time ever, he initiated a position in compliant stablecoin giant Circle (Ticker: CRCL), with a position value of $19.08 million.

As a staunch value investor, Duan Yongping, known for his heavy bets on Apple and Kweichow Moutai, adheres to the philosophy of "if you don't understand it, don't invest." This move into Circle not only signifies the formal acceptance of Web3 compliant assets by traditional, established capital. This article will conduct an in-depth analysis of Circle's Q1 performance and latest product strategy, examining whether this stablecoin giant can pivot its business model from "interest-driven" to "infrastructure-driven" through a fundamental restructuring of its underlying architecture.

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Circle has had a busy week.

Alongside the release of its Q1 2026 results — total revenue and reserve interest income approaching $700 million (up 20% YoY), USDC circulation reaching $77 billion, and on-chain transaction volume hitting $21.5 trillion — the company also unveiled two major product announcements and completed a $222 million token presale.

Changing the 'Interest Rate Voucher' Label

For a long time, Circle has been labeled as an "interest rate proxy tool": in 2024, 99% of its revenue came from interest earned on USDC reserve assets.

This makes the business extremely sensitive to interest rate cycles, leaving equity investors with little basis for valuation beyond spread income and USDC supply growth. Arc (its Layer-1 blockchain), the Circle Agent Stack, and the Payments Network are Circle's concentrated attempts to change this narrative — aiming to diversify revenue and shift the stock's valuation logic from an "earnings yield multiple" to an "infrastructure multiple."

Perhaps the most unusual aspect is that Circle, a publicly listed company with a traditional equity structure, raised $222 million through a token presale for its new stablecoin-focused Layer-1 blockchain, achieving a $30 billion fully diluted valuation (FDV).

In finance, some instruments go on a conventional cap table, while others are protocol-specific tokens. Notably, Coinbase's Ethereum L2 network, Base, has yet to issue a token. The fact that a multi-billion dollar public company can complete such a token raise means that digital assets have officially landed on Wall Street.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which committed $75 million, with participation from BlackRock and Apollo. The presale includes multi-year lock-up periods; investors also have repayment rights if Arc fails to reach key network milestones.

Circle holds 25% of the initial 10 billion token supply, with 60% allocated to network participants and 15% reserved as a long-term reserve. The Arc mainnet is expected to launch in the summer of 2026, and as of early May, its testnet has processed 244 million transactions.

Currently, the utility of the ARC token is still in the exploration phase. This means you can still raise over $200 million today without having a fully developed tokenomics model. Furthermore, upon closer inspection, building a Layer-1 blockchain doesn't actually require $200 million either.

Alongside Arc's launch, Circle also unveiled the Circle Agent Stack — a toolkit for developers to build "AI agents that transact using USDC," featuring wallets, a marketplace, and a Nanopayments layer capable of supporting transfers as low as $0.000001.

With this, the company joins Stripe, Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Fiserv, and Brex in the race to "provide banking services for robots."

Arc is a Defensive Play

Today, USDC operates across dozens of public chains and wallets like Ethereum and Solana. Circle earns interest income from all these reserve assets. But the problem is how much of that income it can actually retain.

According to the Co-operation Agreement signed with Coinbase in 2023 (signed when the Centre consortium was dissolved, giving Coinbase, as Circle's largest distribution channel, significant negotiating leverage), the distribution of reserve interest income is structured in three steps:

• Circle first takes a small issuer fee at the top.
• Then, both parties receive their respective share of reserve interest income based on the proportion of USDC held in their respective custody products.
• As for all remaining profits — Coinbase takes 50% directly.

The result is that Coinbase takes a cut of reserve interest income even from USDC not held in its custody.

In 2024, out of Circle's $1.68 billion total revenue, a staggering $908 million was passed to Coinbase. This agreement auto-renews every three years, and Circle has no unilateral right to exit. Therefore, Arc is, in a way, Circle's effort to build an underlying infrastructure it fully controls and directly earns fees from.

Let's reiterate: Coinbase has a 50% "net profit haircut" claim on almost all of Circle's revenue, and Circle has no escape route other than finding a clever "backdoor."

Arc's acquisition logic is straightforward: it's a Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin-native finance. It uses USDC as the gas token, features sub-second transaction finality, optional privacy, EVM compatibility, and quantum-resistant architecture. For institutions whose business revolves around fund transfers, this represents a new generation of settlement infrastructure, an alternative to ACH, SWIFT, and correspondent banking.

Launched as a testnet in October 2025, it has already attracted over 100 institutional participants, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Visa, and State Street, processing 244 million transactions.

However, it's fair to say that similar institutions have previously joined Tempo and various AI payment and agent protocols we've covered. This shows the industry is diversifying in its approach to rebuilding payment rails.

In contrast, the $30 billion fully diluted valuation (FDV) attached to the presale seems harder to justify, as the functionality of the ARC token is still being explored. What investors are essentially betting on is the option value of Circle owning the "master chain for stablecoin settlements" — thus closing the vertical loop and plugging the current value leak to third parties. Whether this option is worth $30 billion depends on future transaction volumes. Specifically, it depends on Circle's ability to migrate enough of the current $77 billion circulation to Arc to generate service fees that support that valuation.

Regulatory context also intensifies this urgency.

The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, explicitly paves the way for banks to issue their own payment stablecoins through subsidiaries, under the oversight of their existing federal regulators. JPMorgan and Bank of New York are already running tokenized deposit pilots. Once regulated bank-issued dollar tokens reach scale, demand for third-party stablecoin issuers like Circle will narrow.

Arc doesn't directly solve this problem, but owning proprietary on-chain infrastructure can create network effects and switching costs. It's a defensive line against the risk of profit-sharing or vertical integration from everyone from Canton to Ripple to JPMorgan's Kinexys.

Circle Agent Stack is an Offensive Play

The Agent Stack is a developer toolkit for building AI agents that can transact using USDC. It consists of wallets, a marketplace, and a nanopayment layer enabling transfers as low as $0.000001. The core logic is: as AI agents autonomously handle more operational and financial tasks, the scale and granularity of transactions they require will be unsupported by existing payment rails (like card networks, ACH, SWIFT) due to their high fixed costs (making sub-cent transactions economically unfeasible). A programmable USDC-native chain supporting micro-payments has no such cost floor. For AI agents needing to pay per API call, per compute second, or per data query, no perfect solution currently exists in the market.

Ramp launched Agent Cards in March 2026. Simply put, it allows companies to issue virtual cards for spending by autonomous agents. Stripe, after acquiring Bridge in late 2024, has its own answer: issuing agent-specific cards via Bridge, providing wallet infrastructure via Privy, and supporting stablecoin payment acceptance in 32 markets.

• Ramp's Agent Cards: Built for enterprise expense control.
• Circle's Agent Stack: Geared towards USDC-native micro-payments on the Arc chain.
• Stripe: Positions itself as a full-stack layer (offering fiat, stablecoins, and wallet infrastructure under one API).

The Circle vs. Stripe Showdown

Circle's structural advantage lies in the asset itself.

USDC is the dominant compliant stablecoin, serving as the unit of account for a large portion of on-chain activity. Stripe's Bridge, however, issues its own stablecoins via "Open Issuance." USDH, one of Bridge's flagship issuances, announced its shutdown this week after failing to compete with the $5 billion USDC presence on Hyperliquid, with Coinbase stepping in as the official USDC treasury deployer. Building an agent infrastructure layer on top of USDC means agents inherit existing liquidity and network depth from day one. This asset advantage has proven much harder to replicate than it might seem.

As mentioned, Stripe also incubated Tempo — a Layer-1 blockchain specifically tailored for payments. However, Tempo is positioned as a general-purpose payment settlement layer supporting any stablecoin, whereas Arc is built entirely around USDC. Both companies are betting that the future of payments will settle on customized, dedicated chains rather than general-purpose ones like Ethereum.

Differences in capital structure are also noteworthy. Circle raised $222 million for Arc via a presale ($30 billion FDV). Stripe, on the other hand, is privately held, consistently profitable, and valued at $70 billion — it can fund Tempo and Bridge expansion from its own balance sheet without diluting equity through tokens.

The way these two companies can deploy ammunition to absorb and subsidize the cost of bootstrapping a new chain ecosystem is fundamentally different.

Ultimately, the capabilities and inclinations of a "payment processor (like Stripe)" versus a "cash-equivalent financial instrument issuer (like Circle)" are vastly different. The former excels at distribution, sitting on a vast ecosystem of merchants and customers; the latter holds an asset position in every exchange and crypto wallet. We believe blindly pursuing vertical integration and entering an expensive arms race would be a mistake.

The Revenue Ledger Arithmetic

Circle's business model today is simple: $77 billion in USDC outstanding, earning roughly a 4.1% return on reserve assets, a significant portion of which goes to Coinbase under the distribution agreement. Its total 2025 revenue was $2.75 billion.

Analysts forecast 2026 revenue around $3.2 billion, representing roughly 15% growth. This is quite modest compared to last year's 64% growth rate, reflecting two real headwinds:

• Falling interest rates compressing reserve asset yields;
• The GENIUS Act placing restrictions on how reserve income is shared with distribution partners, putting the Coinbase agreement under regulatory scrutiny.

New products must be understood against this backdrop. Circle estimates non-reserve revenue for 2026 at $150 million to $170 million, up from $110 million in 2025, but still less than 6% of total revenue. Arc transaction fees, Agent Stack developer revenue, and CPN (Circle Payments Network) fees are all extremely nascent. For the valuation shift from "interest rate proxy tool" to "infrastructure platform" to materialize, these business lines need not just absolute growth, but a meaningful increase in revenue share. Based on the current trajectory, Circle's narrative is outpacing its financial numbers.

The stock price reflects this tug-of-war. CRCL IPO'd at $31 in June 2025, briefly spiked near $300, then retreated and stabilized around $114. Following the Q1 earnings release, JPMorgan raised its price target to $155, Needham to $150, while Deutsche Bank gave $101. Consensus market expectations hover around $125-$130, implying very cautious upside from current levels.

Bull and Bear Cases

The bull case requires three conditions to materialize simultaneously:

• USDC circulation growth is fast enough to offset the decline in reserve yields;
• Arc generates significant fee income and partially replaces or eliminates the need for the Coinbase agreement;
• The Agent Stack establishes itself as the dominant infrastructure layer for agent payments before Stripe crushes it with its scale.

If all three are met, Circle will have successfully transformed into a payment infrastructure company, its valuation multiples driven by transaction volume and network effects, rather than tied to the Federal Reserve's interest rate cycle.

The bear case is much simpler:

Interest rates fall faster than circulation volume grows; restructuring the Coinbase agreement reduces distribution channels without effectively making up for transaction volume; Arc fails to migrate a sufficient scale of USDC to its own chain; Stripe or Ramp launches superior agent infrastructure at lower cost, outflanking Circle.

Circle's announcements are strategically the right moves. But for now, they are chips and bets, not yet real businesses. Circle is asking investors to pay for the option value of all three scenarios playing out simultaneously, while its core business model faces genuine structural headwinds. It's not an unreasonable request — it just seems expensive at the current valuation.