Circle said it paid about $819 million of its roughly $1.4 billion in first-half 2026 revenue to USDC distribution partners and transaction costs, or about 59 cents of each revenue dollar. Kash Razzaghi, Circle’s chief commercial officer, disclosed the split in an Oct. 16 blog post. The post does not say how much of the $819 million went to partners and how much went to transaction costs.
Another roughly $473 million, about 34 cents of each dollar, went back into the business, Razzaghi wrote, covering licenses, bank relationships, settlement liquidity, compliance, new products and blockchain integrations. Circle kept “7 cents of net profit from every dollar of revenue earned,” he wrote.
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A Reply to ‘New Entrants’
Razzaghi presented the figures as a response to “new entrants” that argue issuers hold on to too much of a stablecoin’s income and charge too much for redemptions.
“Circle shares the majority of USDC’s economics with the partners that drive its adoption,” he wrote. He described pitches to hand partners a “substantial majority” of issuer income as offering “a stablecoin that distributes everything but funds nothing.”
“Without that foundation, a stablecoin is not a digital dollar; it is a token,” Razzaghi wrote in the post, referring to Circle’s spending on licensing, banking and liquidity.
Circle’s post does not name Open USD or any other competitor. In June, Unchained reported that more than 140 companies, including Coinbase, Visa and Stripe, had backed Open USD, a stablecoin from Open Standard that would give its partners all of its reserve earnings minus a small management fee.
How Partners Earn
Under the arrangement Razzaghi described, a partner’s share of reserve income rises with the USDC balances it attracts and holds. Razzaghi singled out Coinbase, pointing to its second-quarter results, which showed a record $20 billion in average USDC held in its products, up 44% year over year. He also cited Binance, which agreed to a five-year commercial deal with Circle in September and bought $100 million of its stock. More than 150 other partners have an economic stake in USDC’s growth, the post said.
On redemptions, Razzaghi said every Circle customer can redeem USDC for free over standard bank rails, which settle in up to two business days. Free, near-instant redemption is available to Circle Payments Network users and to customers who qualify through Arc, Circle Mint or Circle Wallets. He said Circle pays for that by keeping cash at partner banks, where it earns less than Treasuries would. “We carry that cost so customers don’t have to wait,” he wrote.
Circle said USDC handled more than $36 trillion in onchain volume in the first half, and that it minted and redeemed more than $315 billion of the token over the same period. By Circle’s count, USDC handled roughly 77% of stablecoin transaction volume across the world in June, compared with 60% a year earlier.
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The post Circle Says 59 Cents of Each Revenue Dollar Went to USDC Partners and Transaction Costs appeared first on Unchained.