$CRCL Today is a new high, which would have been a happy thing for everyone. As a result, when I opened the group, I saw that the group members were shorting 🤡 The story behind Circle recently recommended listening to @fishkiller's web3 101 and Silicon Valley 101 podcasts There are a lot of details mentioned in it, including the history of Circle, the details of the IPO and the future stablecoin landscape. 1. The past and present of Circle Initially it was a crypto payment & wallet service; In 2018, it spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire Poloniex, laying out exchanges and OTC. In 2019, when he was on the verge of bankruptcy in the bear market, he sold Poloniex to Sun Yuchen, and the strong man broke his wrist and only kept the USDC issuance, and built a Centre alliance with Coinbase. In August 2022, it repurchased Coinbase's 50% stake in Centre for approximately $210 million, locking in a long-term agreement for a 50% future USDC revenue share. 2. The ups and downs of USDC Rapid expansion with Coinbase channel distribution; When SVB collapsed in 2023, the liquidity plummeted by 30% from about $47 billion, and the price anchored to $0.92 at one point. After the event, most of the reserves were moved to New York Mellon for custody and the BlackRock management agreement was introduced, and the USDC issuance scale has returned to $600+ billion so far, firmly occupying the second place in the market. 3. The new law and the industry game The just-passed Genius Act prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying direct dividends in name to curb hostile interest rate wars. Circle and Coinbase circumvent restrictions through a distribution fee structure or curves; Tether is also accelerating compliance, and is clinging to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce's family and SoftBank's resources; On the other hand, Binance + CZ, Trump's son-in-law & Middle East consortium are pushing USD 1. $Coin Today is also a big hit. Base-based faucets such as $AERO deserve continued attention in the future.