Circle keeps just 7% of USDC revenue, its own figures show

Circle kept little of what USDC earned this year. The stablecoin issuer said $819 million of its roughly $1.4 billion in first-half 2026 revenue, about 59 cents of every dollar, went to distribution partners and transaction costs. Its own cut: about 7 cents.

The breakdown came in a blog post dated October 16 by Kash Razzaghi, Circle's chief commercial officer, not in an audited filing. He cast the split as a strength. Circle "shares the majority of USDC's economics with the partners that drive its adoption," he wrote.

Where the $1.4 billion went

Most of it left the building. Of the roughly $1.4 billion USDC brought in from January through June, about $819 million covered distribution partners and transaction costs, Razzaghi said. He did not split that figure into partner payments and raw costs. Another $473 million, close to 34 cents on the dollar, paid for licenses, bank relationships, settlement liquidity, compliance, new products and blockchain work. What remained was small. Circle said it held onto about 7 cents of net profit for every revenue dollar.

USDC's reach, and Coinbase's place in it

USDC moved real money. The token settled more than $36 trillion in on-chain transactions over the half, and Circle minted and redeemed over $315 billion of it, the company said. By June, Circle put USDC at about 77 percent of global stablecoin transaction volume, up from roughly 60 percent a year earlier. That reach runs through partners, and one stands above the rest. Circle pointed to Coinbase, whose own results showed an average of $20 billion in USDC across its products, up 44 percent from a year earlier. Circle did not say how much of the $819 million went to Coinbase alone. It named no partner's cut. The gap matters, because the Coinbase deal has long been seen as the largest single claim on USDC's income. Coinbase is not the only big name attached. Circle agreed a five-year commercial deal with Binance in September, and the exchange took a $100 million stake in the company, Yahoo Finance reported.

A pitch aimed at new rivals

Timing says something. Razzaghi published the numbers as a wave of new dollar tokens reaches the market, from World Liberty Financial's USD1 to Polkadot's issuer-free dotUSD. Some new entrants argue that issuers like Circle keep too much of the reserve income and charge too much to redeem. His answer named no rival. A model that hands partners almost everything, he wrote, is "a stablecoin that distributes everything but funds nothing." The post also lands weeks after the EU named USDC its first significant e-money token, a designation that brings extra oversight in Europe. Read plainly, the message turns a cost into a selling point. Circle keeps little because it pays others to carry USDC, and it wants that seen as reach, not weakness.

What to watch

That thin margin is the thing to track. Circle is a listed company, so its profit lives or dies by this split. Reserve income moves with interest rates, so a cut would squeeze the 7 cents Circle keeps. Its slice of the stablecoin market also faces newer dollar tokens and bank-issued coins. The next earnings update will show whether paying partners to carry USDC still pays Circle back.