Circle said on Tuesday that Binance has bought a 100 million stake in the company, growing the world’s largest crypto exchange’s ties to the firm behind USDC, one of the biggest dollar-backed
Circle said on Tuesday that Binance has bought a 100 million stake in the company, growing the world’s largest crypto exchange’s ties to the firm behind USDC, one of the biggest dollar-backed stablecoins in the market.
In a regulatory filing, Circle said that on September 17 it sold about 1.24 million shares to Binance at 80.84 dollars a share, a price below where the stock was trading at the time. Circle shares rose almost 2% in premarket trading on the news, adding to a run that has already put the stock up roughly 19% this year and given Circle a market value near $ 24 billion. USDC has a market cap of nearly $ 75 billion.
Alongside the share sale, the two companies increased their existing commercial deal into a new five-year agreement. Circle will pay Binance a monthly incentive fee tied to how much USDC sits in Binance’s wallet infrastructure, and Binance has agreed to actively promote USDC across its platform. Either side can walk away early if specific conditions are triggered, but as it stands, the deal locks the two companies together through 2031.
Source: Binance
Binance isn’t the first major exchange to turn a stablecoin partnership into an ownership stake. Coinbase did almost the same thing with Circle back in August 2023, taking a minority equity position and signing a revenue-sharing deal that gave Coinbase all the reserve income earned on USDC held on its own platform, plus half of whatever USDC earned everywhere else.
That agreement just got renewed through 2029 on the same terms, three years after it was first signed, proof the structure works well enough for both sides to keep it unchanged. Binance’s new deal with Circle follows the same pattern, an equity stake paired with a fee tied to how much USDC actually sits on the platform, just two years and one exchange later.
What makes Binance’s version different is what came before it. Binance already tried running its own stablecoin once. Its BUSD token, issued through a partner called Paxos, was ordered to stop minting in 2023 after New York’s financial regulator stepped in, even though the SEC never brought a formal case. Rather than try to build another stablecoin of its own, Binance chose to buy into the one that had already done the work of staying compliant.
Circle secured a license under the European Union’s new crypto rules and has positioned itself for years as the more regulated alternative to Tether, whose USDT token still dominates the market with a cap north of 140 billion dollars despite facing its own questions about reserve transparency.
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For Binance’s more than 240 million users, there may be more trading pairs, more promotions, and USDC to be treated increasingly as Binance’s preferred dollar token rather than just one option among several. Binance has also said it will hold USDC as part of its own corporate treasury. For USDC holders, more usage on the world’s biggest exchange means more liquidity and likely tighter, more reliable pricing when converting in and out of it.
Investors may see this as a competitive positioning as much as the money itself. A hundred million dollars and a five-year commitment show a real stake in the stablecoin market. Circle, for its part, gets a second major exchange locked in behind USDC the same way Coinbase already is, strengthening its position against Tether without having to spend anything to get there.
Online users also had a say, Tekus saw the deal as a sign that regulated stablecoins are moving from an experiment into core financial infrastructure, with cheaper remittances and easier cross-border payments likely to be important tests of that growth.
Plutus focused on distribution. USDC has about $75 billion in circulation compared with roughly $183 billion for USDT, and Plutus argued that much of the gap comes down to where each stablecoin is available and how easily users can access it. Binance gives USDC a much bigger distribution channel, putting the token in front of millions of users who may otherwise choose USDT.
Meanwhile, Circle has received final approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to launch a national trust bank named Circle National Trust. This decision establishes the First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A. as a federally regulated custodian. The milestone changes stablecoin safety by placing USD Coin (USDC) infrastructure directly under federal banking oversight.
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