Circle sheds 5% of staff as a $182M token presale props up quarterly revenue

Circle Internet Group shed roughly 5% of its staff during the third quarter, a reduction the USDC issuer buried in the footnotes of an earnings report. That release showed revenue up 17% at $865 million and net income ahead 5% at $226 million.

A $9.1 million restructuring charge was booked against the cuts, which the company said were “designed to better align our organizational structure with our operating model and strategic priorities.” Notice-period pay, severance and benefits accounted for the charge.

How many workers lost their jobs, and which teams they came from, went unstated, and the layoffs were absent from the business highlights section of the release.

In premarket trading CRCL slipped about 1.2% to $74.33, having added 4.4% on Tuesday. The shares still change hands far below the peaks touched after the company's June 2025 IPO.

A single token sale did the lifting

Underneath that headline number, the core softened. Reserve income — the interest earned on the Treasuries and cash standing behind USDC — dropped 8% from a year earlier to $658 million, with the reserve return rate down 61 basis points at 3.5%.

An 8% increase in average USDC in circulation to $73.3 billion was not enough to offset the weaker yields, and quarter-end circulation was unchanged from a year earlier at $73.9 billion. Circle's slice of the fiat-backed stablecoin market eased to 27%.

A one-time item filled the hole. Other revenue leapt to $207 million from $29 million, $182 million of it generated by the private presale of ARC, the token attached to Circle's new Arc blockchain. Remove that and total revenue would have fallen. Adjusted EBITDA of $317 million, 85% higher, rests on the same presale.

Costs fill in the rest of the picture. Operating expenses climbed 16% to $245 million, driven by heavier general and administrative, depreciation, IT and marketing outlays, while distribution costs — what Circle pays partners including Coinbase for holding USDC — declined 8% to $409 million. The staff reduction arrives while the company builds out Arc, folds in an asset acquisition made in January and readies itself to take on Tazapay.

Circle's spending is aimed past its core product

Money is going toward growth beyond the core business. Arc's public mainnet went live Sept. 16 with over 100 institutional builders on board, and the full 10 billion ARC supply was minted by Circle, making it the first public company to issue a network token for a layer-one chain of its own.

A deal to acquire Tazapay, a Singapore-based cross-border payments platform handling more than $25 billion in annualized volume, has been agreed and is expected to close in 2027.

Days before a $6.34 billion hack, Binance invested $100 million in Circle equity and renewed a partnership covering USDC distribution.

On Jan. 18 the GENIUS Act takes effect, installing federal licensing and reserve requirements for stablecoin issuers — a framework the Federal Reserve has started to flesh out. Circle has stated that its stablecoins will meet the standard. What the quarter leaves unresolved is whether a thinner payroll and a one-off token windfall can carry the company until rates stop declining.