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Circle Internet Group Inc., the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, Thursday saw its shares jump 168% over an already raised $31 offering price on its first day of trading.

The company had previously set a price range of $27 to $28 per share. Reuters reports that ahead of its debut, Circle and its shareholders have sold 34 million shares at the revised $31 per share, valuing the company at roughly $8 billion. They raised about $1.1 billion with the offering.

When asked why the company pivoted its price to the upsized $31, Circle President Heath Tarbert told SiliconANGLE in an interview that the company kept a larger perspective on the long horizon. Talbert is a lawyer and former government official who served as chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

“Our goal was to come out with an IPO that sets us up for the future, allows us to continue to execute,” Tarbert said. “Not think about day to day price, but really focus on driving that long term value.”

Founded in 2013, Circle specializes in digital currency services. Its flagship product, USD Coin or USDC, is a stablecoin, one pegged to the U.S. dollar and designed to facilitate secure and efficient digital transactions. As of today, USDC is the second most popular stablecoin by market capitalization and the seventh most popular cryptocurrency, according to CoinMarketCap, a site that tracks cryptocurrency capitalization.

In its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in April, the company revealed that it had booked $1.68 billion in revenue and reserve income in 2024, up from $1.45 billion in 2023 and $772 million in 2022. Circle also reported net income last year of $156 million, down from $268 million a year earlier.

Beyond issuing USDC, Circle offers a range of services designed to support businesses and developers in integrating digital currencies into their operations. The services include application programming interfaces for payments that support the acceptance and processing of USDC transactions and infrastructure solutions for managing digital assets.

Circle also provides a programmable Web3 wallet platform that allows users to store, send and receive cryptocurrencies securely. The platform seeks to enhance the adoption of decentralized finance by simplifying user interactions with blockchain-based assets.

The IPO comes at a time of an improving regulatory environment for cryptocurrency and stablecoins. The Trump administration has been far more friendly to the sector than the Biden administration which launched legal action against major players in the sector.

“We view regulation, compliance and transparency as a competitive advantage,” Tarbert said. “Particularly now with the regulatory framework shifting.”

As noted in late May when Circle formally launched its IPO offering, the sector has also been assisted by U.S. banking regulators, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Federal Reserve, withdrawing previous restrictive statements on crypto assets, giving banks more freedom to engage with crypto assets without prior approval. The change gave businesses and cryptocurrency exchanges larger opportunities to operate on U.S. soil.

Circle’s IPO is also set to be one of the biggest of the year.

Other companies that have gone public so far this year include identity security company SailPoint Technologies Inc., which raised $1.38 billion at $23 per share on Feb. 13, CoreWeave Inc., which disappointed on debut in March, and eToro Inc., which went public in May.

Companies lining up to go public later this year include collaborative design software startup Figma Inc., which also announced on April 15 and financial services company Chime Financial Inc., which announced its IPO plans on May 13.

With reporting from Kyt Dotson

Image: SiliconANGLE/Reve