Bitwise's Ryan Rasmussen says Wall Street is underestimating Circle by treating it as a single-product stablecoin issuer rather than a two-sided business. In his view, the market prices Circle almost entirely on reserve income from USDC issuance while largely ignoring a second, faster-growing line: the payments infrastructure business built around Circle Arc, the company’s own layer-1 blockchain designed to route stablecoin payment activity. That second segment, Rasmussen argues, is “very mispriced by the market.”
The thesis rests on scale. Rasmussen puts the current stablecoin market at roughly $300 billion and expects it to grow toward $3-5 trillion, a tenfold-plus expansion that he believes leaves room for Circle to keep growing even as competitors like the shared-governance stablecoin OpenUSD enter the field. “I think we’ll look back five years from now and Circle will be not only a stablecoin giant, but a payment giant,” he said.
A bullish call against a bearish tape
The timing is notable: Rasmussen’s call comes just a week after Morgan Stanley slashed its price target on Circle stock (CRCL) from $106 to $38, and shares remain down roughly 30% year-to-date even after a recent bounce to the mid-$60s. That split between a steep sell-side downgrade and a bullish long-term infrastructure thesis captures the core disagreement about Circle right now — whether near-term reserve-yield pressure or long-term payments-network optionality should set the stock's price.
Regulation is reshaping the reserve-income side
Part of what's squeezing the near-term numbers is the same law Rasmussen expects to eventually benefit Circle: the GENIUS Act, which restricts stablecoin reserves to cash, demand deposits, and short-term Treasury securities, limiting issuers' ability to diversify into higher-yielding assets. Regulators have been layering on additional compliance requirements since the law passed, including a Federal Reserve proposal that would require stablecoin issuers to maintain formal customer identification programs, mirroring bank-style anti-money-laundering obligations. Rasmussen's argument is essentially that this regulatory build-out — while a near-term cost center — is what ultimately hands scaled, compliant issuers like Circle a durable moat as the market grows toward institutional size.
Related: Stablecoin Supply Grew $931M Last Week as DEX and Perp Volume Fell
What to watch next
Circle's own second-quarter results already showed the shift Rasmussen is betting on, with revenue climbing as USDC adoption expanded beyond crypto-native trading into broader institutional and business use. The metric he says investors should track over the next year isn't stablecoin supply alone but how that supply growth translates into transaction and payments revenue as Circle Arc gets deeper integration into traditional finance rails — the piece of the business he says the market still isn't pricing at all.
