The $50 Billion Company That Does Almost Nothing

Something strange happens to Wall Street. This is not Elon Musk, the AI, or an late evening of Donald Trump. It is a crypto company called Circle Internet Group, and it gives the market that the glory days of the Dot-Com bubble are back.

Circle became a public on June 5. During eleven negotiation sessions, its shares exploded by 675% almost unprecedented, adding more than $ 42 billion to its market capitalization. The company is now negotiated with an assessment that places it in the same league as Tech Unicorns and AI Moons, commanding a price that investors pay, in substance, $ 295 for each $ 1 of its profits.

There is only one problem. Circle has no revolutionary AI. It does not build elegant consumer gadgets. Its business model is shocking.

Here’s how it works: you give Circle a dollar. They give you a digital token, called USDC, worth the same dollar. They then take your real dollar, invest it in something sure like the obligations of the US Treasury in the short term and perceive interest.

You get the token. They get profit. That’s it. This is all the activity.

This led the criticisms to label Circle barely more than a glorified “silver wrapper”. So why does Wall Street treat him like the next Tesla?

The answer is a word: Stablecoin.

The USDC is a stablecoin, a digital token fixed to a stable asset, in this case, the US dollar. The idea is that for each USDC token, there is a real dollar seated in a reserve account. This makes it incredibly useful for crypto traders who need the speed of digital assets without the wild volatility of Bitcoin.

And now, the Bulls are betting that the stablecoins are about to move. The Senate has just adopted the “Engineering Act”, the historical legislation which opens the way to banks, fintechs like Paypal and even retailers like Walmart and Amazon to use stablecoins for payments. Suddenly, the crypto dream becoming a real alternative to visa or mastercard seems to be at hand.

Analysts salivate. Citi predict The Stablescoin market could reach 3.7 billions of dollars by 2030. In this scenario, Circle, as a neutral platform not linked to a single bank, is perfectly positioned to collect.

But there is a catch. The business model which seems so brilliant in a high interest rate environment is also its greatest weakness.

“All of Circle’s cases is literally glued to Fed’s policy,” wrote a user in a viral article on Reddit R / Wallstreetbets. “It is an FNB of the treasure in a trench.”

If the federal reserve reduces the rates, the main flow of income from Circle is shrinking. There is also nothing preventing the biggest players from launching their own stables of Deed, erasing the edge of the circle overnight. If everyone offers the same thing, Circle’s moat starts to be very superficial. And yet, Wall Street accumulates as if it was the next OpenAi. What if regulators change melody? The entire model could be at risk. The company is remarkably fragile.

When contacted by Gizmodo, a spokesman said that the company was in a post-compliance “calm period”, preventing him from making promotional statements.

For the moment, the media threshing wins. Circle’s stock is on fire, powered by the promise of a future where we all pay our coffee with digital dollars. But below the surface, this $ 50 billion company is innovating or disrupting. It simply contains your money, gives you a digital receipt and the interests. And in the bizarre world of 2025 finance, this is apparently enough to be crowned the new king of Wall Street.