Unleash the AI agents, says Circle (CRCL) co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire. "We think that there will eventually be billions of agents providing work and labor, and they'll be able to be orchestrated and integrated within a firm and across firm boundaries," Allaire said on Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid (see video above). "And this is an incredible time for entrepreneurs, for startups, for builders who are going to be able to tap into these agent labor markets to get things done and accelerate their own development and growth."
Allaire is aggressively using AI agents alongside human workers to help scale up its stablecoin business.
"AI and humans can interact directly through messaging environments like Slack, but also can interact between each other and communicate between each other directly," Allaire explained. "And so the thing that we're doing at Circle is we're asking all of our employees to be part of crafting this and building this. And this is, I think, incredibly exciting because we want our employees to have the superpowers of fleets of agents that they can use themselves to amplify their own capabilities. So this is an opportunity to multiply the capabilities of a firm and of humans themselves."
Circle just dropped a second quarter that was good enough to send the stock higher — but not so clean that the bulls can declare total victory. Hence, the stock is down 2% in Wednesday's trading.
Revenue and reserve income came in at $701.3 million, up 6.6% year over year but shy of the $712.3 million Wall Street was expecting.
Circle minted $83 billion in USD Coin (USDC-USD), missing the $88.82 billion estimate, and the average USDC in circulation of $76.5 billion came in just under the $77.48 billion consensus. These data points tell you Circle is growing, but not quite at the pace the most aggressive stablecoin bulls had penciled in.
The profit story is cleaner: Adjusted EBITDA of $143 million beat the $139.6 million estimate by a comfortable margin, net income swung to $48 million from a loss of $482.1 million a year ago, and the reserve return rate of 3.5% came in essentially exactly where analysts expected.
The bottom line is that Circle missed on core stablecoin volume metrics but beat on profitability. The market's job today is to figure out which of those storylines to place more weight on.
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One factor to watch is Circle's recently granted bank charter. Allaire said getting the bank operational will unlock new areas of growth.
"What we've talked about at a high level is that aspects of the USDC reserve would, in time, be part of the trust bank, but it also gives us the ability to provide custody services and digital asset custody services," Allaire said. "From our perspective, there's an opportunity not just for the custody of stablecoins, but also other tokenized assets, tokenized real-world assets."