NEW YORK, December 31, 2025, 15:54 ET — Regular session
- Circle shares fell about 1% in late-afternoon trade on the final session of 2025.
- Bitcoin was lower and on track for its first annual decline since 2022, weighing on crypto-linked equities.
- Traders are watching year-end funding conditions and the 2026 rate path that influences yields on reserve assets.
Circle Internet Group, Inc. shares slipped in afternoon trading on Wednesday, tracking a softer tone across crypto-linked assets into the final hour of the year’s last U.S. session. The stock was down 1.1% at $79.05, after trading between $78.98 and $80.37.
The move matters because Circle sits at the intersection of two markets that have been volatile into year-end: cryptocurrencies and short-term U.S. rates. Both can move quickly around thin liquidity and policy headlines.
Circle issues USDC, a so-called stablecoin — a crypto token designed to keep a steady value — and stablecoins are typically backed by low-risk assets such as U.S. dollars and Treasury bonds, a Reuters report on the company’s IPO filing said. USDC is the second-biggest stablecoin after Tether, according to CoinGecko, the report said.
Bitcoin was on track to end 2025 down more than 6% — its first annual loss since 2022 — after a year in which it hit a record above $126,000 in October and then struggled to regain footing, a separate Reuters report said. “Bitcoin increasingly exhibits the characteristics of a risk asset,” Linh Tran, a senior market analyst at XS.com, said. Reuters
Bitcoin was down 0.4% at about $87,513 in the latest trade.
Other crypto-exposed names fell more sharply. Coinbase Global was down 2.2%, while Strategy — a prominent bitcoin holder — slid 2.5%.
Rates were also in focus into year-end. U.S. short-term funding markets saw the usual turn-of-year tension, but Federal Reserve bill-buying and a record $74.6 billion draw on the New York Fed’s Standing Repo Facility helped keep cash moving through the system, market participants told Reuters.
Bond investors are heading into 2026 expecting the Fed to slow the pace of rate cuts after easing by 75 basis points in 2025, with traders pricing about 60 basis points of easing next year as of Monday, Reuters reported. For companies whose economics are tied to yields on short-dated government securities, the direction of policy expectations can matter as much as crypto prices.
Circle went public in June after pricing its U.S. initial public offering at $31 a share, raising $1.05 billion, Reuters reported at the time.
Into the start of 2026, investors will be looking for signs that demand for dollar-pegged tokens remains resilient and that trading and payments activity on crypto rails continues to expand beyond speculative flows.
They will also watch the rate backdrop. Any shift in expectations for Fed cuts — or renewed funding-market stress that pushes short-term borrowing costs higher — can change how investors model the yield earned on reserve assets that underpin stablecoins.
For now, Circle is trading like a macro proxy: sensitive to the daily swing in bitcoin and to how markets are pricing the next leg of U.S. rates.
