Circle (USDC)

0 standards supported

Key details

Parent: Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville
Launch: 2013

Overview

Circle is the issuer of USDC, the second-largest US-dollar stablecoin, and a regulated payments-infrastructure company providing stablecoin, programmable-wallet and cross-border settlement APIs [1, 2, us-cro]. It positions USDC as a transparent, fully-reserved, compliance-first dollar token and is among the few stablecoin issuers regulated under both US and EU frameworks.

History

2013 — Circle founded in Boston by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville, initially as a consumer crypto-payments app. 2018 — launches USDC with Coinbase via the Centre Consortium, growing it into a major dollar stablecoin. 2021–2022 — attempts a SPAC merger to go public, which is ultimately terminated amid market conditions. 2023 — dissolves Centre and takes full control of USDC governance; briefly de-pegs during the Silicon Valley Bank crisis before fully recovering. 2024–2025 — obtains an EU MiCA e-money licence (Circle France) and completes a traditional IPO on the NYSE under ticker CRCL in 2025.

Ownership & operator

Operating entity: Circle Internet Group, Inc. (NYSE: CRCL). Major shareholders: public float plus pre-IPO investors including General Catalyst, Accel, IDG, Breyer, Fidelity, BlackRock and others, and co-founder Jeremy Allaire (CEO). Regulators: US state money transmitter regulators and NYDFS, plus EU MiCA via Circle's French e-money licence.

Technical integration

USDC is an ERC-20-style token issued natively on Ethereum and many other chains, transferred via standard crypto wallet addresses. Circle also offers Circle Mint, Programmable Wallets, the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) and payments APIs for businesses; there is no mass-market consumer wallet app.

Implementations & partners

Major competitors: [[tether]] (USDT issuer) and other stablecoin issuers; deeply integrated with [[coinbase]] (USDC distribution partner) and across exchanges like [[binance]] and [[kraken]].

Status

Active, a US-listed stablecoin issuer and the leading regulated alternative to USDT [1, 2].

Sources

1 Circle — official
2 Circle — Wikipedia
us-cro In-corpus: reports/countries/US-united-states.md

Source

Biography extracted from circle.md. See matrix.md for standards-support matrix if present.