Investment bank William Blair reiterated its outperform rating on Circle (CRCL) stock after the stablecoin issuer’s third-quarter results beat the bank’s and Wall Street’s expectations.
Shares fell 3.9% to around $94.50 in pre-market trading on Wednesday.
Analyst Andrew Jeffrey continues to believe that USDC is likely to become the standard for stablecoins, placing Circle at the center of the programmable money revolution.
While the lackluster market response reflects Circle’s expensive valuation and limited short-term catalysts, the analyst recommends investors take advantage of the stock price weakness to build positions, arguing that competing proprietary stablecoins will struggle to match USDC’s size and liquidity.
Jeffrey highlighted steady progress in Circle’s infrastructure efforts, including its orchestration layer CPN and layer 1 blockchain Arc. All of these gained traction as the company added participants to its ecosystem and added advanced tokenization capabilities.
Arc currently has 100 participants and plans to debut on mainnet in 2026 and explore native tokens, the report said.
Trading volumes have increased sharply, with total payable value (TPV) increasing 101x to $3.4 billion annually over the past 12 months, fueling fee increases.
Circle now expects trading revenue to be between $90 million and $100 million in 2025, up from previous expectations of $75 million to $85 million, which William Blair sees as key to revenue growth and diversification.
