Circle launches Agent Stack, allowing AI agents to automatically open wallets and process payments; USDC circulation reaches $77 billion; CRCL stock rises nearly 16% in a single session.
Circle Internet Group is making a big bet on the agent economy. In a Monday packed with announcements, issuer USDC unveiled the launch of the Circle Agent Stack , released its first-quarter earnings, and closed a $222 million Token Sale sale, valuing the company's Arc network at $3 billion. The market reacted positively: CRCL stock closed at $131.76, up nearly 16% in the session, bringing its cumulative gain to almost 50% in a month.
Circle Agent Stack is a suite of tools and services built specifically for AI agents, not traditional developers or businesses. The initial portfolio includes an AI agent wallet, a command-line interface, an agent trading marketplace, and a micro-payment protocol capable of processing USDC transactions as small as $0.000001 USD with high speed and no Gas Price.
This final feature directly targets high-frequency machine-to-machine Microtransaction , which cannot be executed through traditional banking infrastructure because the processing costs exceed the transaction value.
The financial infrastructure is being rebuilt from scratch for AI.
Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire frankly acknowledges the limitations of the current system: traditional financial infrastructure is designed around people, with manual verification processes and approval flows that autonomous software cannot navigate on its own.
The marketplace component in the Agent Stack is designed to fill that gap, allowing AI agents to independently search for, negotiate, and pay for services from other AI agents, creating a machine-to-machine trading ecosystem built on USDC.
In terms of business performance, the circulating supply of USDC reached $77 billion by the end of Q1, a 28% increase year-on-year, demonstrating the stablecoin's sustained growth amidst pressure on the entire cryptocurrency market. Circle is not alone in this race: Amazon is partnering with Coinbase and Stripe, Google Cloud is collaborating with Solana Foundation, and MoonPay has also recently deployed stablecoin payment infrastructure for AI actors.
The simultaneous convergence of major players shows that this is no longer an experiment, but a competition for infrastructure position in an economy where software actors are increasingly becoming the primary players in transactions.
