Circle Internet Financial (Circle) has confidentially filed for a proposed IPO, the company said on Thursday.
Circle is the issuer of the stablecoin USDC, which has the second-largest market capitalization on the market, worth about $25.25 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. The largest stablecoin, Tether, had a market cap of $94.65 billion, at the time of publication.
The number of shares and price range for the proposed IPO is yet to be determined, the company said. Circle did not immediately respond to queries on how this IPO will be different from its previous SPAC efforts.
Private filings for public offerings came into effect thanks to the JOBS Act of 2012, which allowed companies with less than $1 billion in revenue to get their paperwork started without having to disclose the numbers to the general public for some time.
Two SPACs and an IPO
This is not Circle’s first attempt at the public markets.
The company initially planned to list on the public markets in July 2021 by way of a SPAC merger deal with Concord Acquisition Corp. SPACs were all the rage at the time, and the company seemed like a reasonable candidate for a blank-check merger, as it would have allowed Circle to raise capital with a somewhat less proven business model.
Later, when the company decided to effectively double its SPAC value in February 2022, we noted that the repricing was predicated on a massive run-up in the amount of USDC in circulation.
That was around the same time that the United States’ central bank started to raise interest rates. That had several effects on the world economy, and naturally, on the value of crypto assets. Overall, the market suffered as capital became more expensive, but fintech companies, in particular, benefited from interest-derived revenues since they held cash and cash-like investments on their books.