Circle Raises $400M, Eyes Capital Market Applications For USDC

Circle, the U.S.-based company behind the second-largest centralized stablecoin on the market, has raised $400 in a funding round including BlackRock, Fidelity, Marshall Wace, and Fin Capital.

USDC Issuer Circle Raises $400M, Adds BlackRock as Strategic Advisor

Last valued at $9 billion, Circle has landed an additional $400 million in funding.

As per a Tuesday press release, the stablecoin issuer has entered into a funding agreement for a $400 million raise with a group that includes the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, with over $10 trillion in assets under management, fourth-largest Fidelity with over $4.2 trillion, and smaller investment firms Marshall Wace LLP and Fin Capital.

Commenting on the raise, Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said:

“This funding round will drive the next evolution of Circle’s growth… digital currencies like USDC are fueling a global economic transformation, and Circle’s technology infrastructure sits at the center of that change,” he added.

Besides raising the additional capital, Circle has entered into a broader strategic partnership with BlackRock that should help the firm explore capital market applications for USDC. If the company succeeds, the integration of USDC with traditional capital markets would be a first-in-kind as, so far, stablecoins have stayed exclusively crypto-native.

Today’s $400 million raise comes less than a year after Circle raised $440 million in a funding round, including Fidelity, Digital Currency Group, FTX, and others. Earlier this year, in February, the firm also announced that it planned to go public at a $9 billion valuation through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Concord Acquisition Corp. The merge is scheduled to happen between December 2022 and January 2023, after which the company will be listed on the New York Stock exchange under the ticker CRCL.

The USDC stablecoin issued by Circle is currently the second-largest stablecoin in the industry with a market capitalization of around $50.7 billion, trailing behind the older and still largest stablecoin, Tether, which boasts a market cap of roughly $82 billion.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.