North America IPO: Circle Internet’s US$1.2bn IPO
Full circle
Circle Internet’s US$1.2bn NYSE IPO in June has the potential to be a historic transaction in US capital markets, the type of deal that comes around once a decade and produces outsized returns once – or if – a company's vision becomes reality.
In this case it is the burgeoning internet-based financial system built on US dollar-backed stablecoins – essentially a blend of crypto and fiat currencies – that already amounted to around US$200bn as of March and of which US$60bn had been issued by Circle.
Circle's equity story is based on the potential for stablecoins to be embraced across financial markets, particularly as an efficient method for payments.
There was no shortage of believers, leading to a battle for shares and huge returns for those granted an allocation, in contrast to the more circumspect initial outcomes of Amazon, Facebook and Google back in the day.
“Our biggest headache was working through allocations,” said John Andrews, Circle’s head of IR and capital markets. “We were 25 times oversubscribed with very, very heavy demand from long-only investors.
“There were even some celebrities who stepped over the transom, which was amusing and told us we were a popular IPO,” said Andrews, a financial services veteran who helped oversee Goldman Sachs’ IPO in 1999 when at the bank.
JP Morgan, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs had sought to tamp down demand by double-upsizing the base offering to 34m shares, including 19.2m from shareholders, priced at US$31, five dollars above the high-end of the original US$24–$26 range and the 24m shares offered at launch.
The initial demand included US$150m from Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management, its first cornerstone investment.
Circle shares closed on their NYSE debut at US$83.23 and traded as high as US$298.99 within the first month of trading, allowing the greenshoe to be fully exercised.
In August, just 71 days after the IPO, Circle returned with a “smaller” follow-on offering of 10m shares, including 8m secondary, priced at US$130, a 20.3% file-to-offer discount. In addition to cashing out early-stage backers, the follow-on helped establish a “reference price”, said Andrews.
Founded in 2013 by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville, Circle raised money privately at US$0.27 a share on its Series A round, and at US$0.97, US$2.17, US$2.76, US$16.23 and US$42.14 on the B to F rounds – fortunes were made.
This outcome was never guaranteed, and Circle benefited from a circuitous path to the public markets.
In 2021, Circle had agreed to go public via a SPAC merger. That deal collapsed in late 2022 after failing to gain regulatory approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Circle confidentially filed in December 2023 to go public through a regular IPO, winding its way through a one-year-plus review process that culminated in publicly filing in April 2025.
"Jeremy built Circle from the ground up to be a public company,” said Alaoui Zenere, JP Morgan’s head financial services and fintech ECM banking. “This is a compliance-first company built on trust and high quality.”
The pro-stablecoin Genius Act, which was introduced in May and signed into law in July, was a breakthrough moment for institutional acceptance. As of late November, Circle had just under US$74bn of stablecoins in circulation.