Editorial hello
You know crypto and fintech have finally become the very thing they once claimed to disrupt when sitting through a Circle earnings call feels every bit as arduous and jargon-laden as a conventional bank earnings call.
I persevered regardless. Despite the effort, there were really only two notable takeaways. The first was a quiet early reference to the “strong growth” Circle is seeing in other digital assets, most notably EURC — the world’s largest euro stablecoin — which doubled year over year to end the period at €358 million.
The second concerned executives’ repeated insistence that USDC rewards will be driven by “utility” use cases — language that increasingly appears less like marketing and more like regulatory positioning.
This framing, I would say, is clearly designed to align with the final iteration — specifically the so-called “404 compromise” — of the upcoming Clarity Act, which permits stablecoin rewards provided they are not “economically or functionally equivalent to the payment of interest or yield on an interest-bearing bank deposit.”
