Ethereum builds momentum as reserves and ETFs hit new records

Circle, the stablecoin giant that had a mammoth IPO in June 2025, reported its first-quarter earnings early Monday, beating analysts’ estimates on earnings per share but missing on revenue.

Shares initially were up more than 8% at one point in premarket trading, but have since pared some of those gains; they were up 46% year to date before today’s results.

For the first three months of 2026, Circle reported:

• Revenue of $694 million, a 20% increase year over year, but below analysts’ expectations of $715 million, according to FactSet.

• Earnings per share of $0.21, above analysts’ predictions of $0.19.

Circle also said it raised $222 million in the presale of its ARC token, at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation, from investors including a16z Crypto, Apollo Funds, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Bullish, General Catalyst, Haun Ventures, Intercontinental Exchange, IDG Capital, and Janus Henderson Investors.

Circle issues USDC, the second-largest stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, with a $78.3 billion market cap. Its circulation grew 28% to $77 billion, the earnings report shows.

Last week, JPMorgan analysts raised their price target for December 2026 to $112 (in line with where the stock stands now) from $89. The analysts cited USDC growth as well as progress toward a compromise on the CLARITY Act allowing stablecoin rewards.

“As a reminder, we think passage of CLARITY would remove a key terminal risk overhang for Circle’s ability to grow USDC market cap via its distribution partners’ reward programs,” they said.

According to Benchmark Managing Director Mark Palmer, the markup on the bill is expected this week. At CoinDesk’s Consensus conference last week, Patrick Witt, executive director of the president’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, said the administration was targeting a July 4 passage.

TeraWulf, the bitcoin mining company transitioning into data center development, posted Q1 results that were essentially on par with expectations, but investors seemed to like the future transition from volatile bitcoin mining to a “more stable, contracted revenue model” revenue stream driven by “higher-value HPC workloads.”

TeraWulf reported:

• Revenue of $34 million, just missing analyst expectations of $34.7 million.

• An adjusted loss per share of $0.09, exactly meeting the consensus estimate from analysts polled by FactSet.

Around 62% of the firm’s Q1 revenue stemmed from high-performance computing lease revenue, “representing the initial ramp of long-term customer agreements,” TeraWulf CFO Patrick Fleury said.

“As we continue to scale, we expect the business to be increasingly driven by recurring, contracted revenue, reducing exposure to the volatility historically associated with bitcoin mining,” Fleury continued.

Fleury noted TeraWulf had $3.1 billion of cash to support its continued transition.

Shares of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, slid in after-hours trading after it missed analysts’ expectations for Q1 earnings.

The company reported:

• Total revenue of $1.4 billion, below the nearly $1.5 billion analysts polled by FactSet were expecting.

• Transaction revenue of $755.8 million, well below the consensus estimate of $808.1 million and a 40% decline from nearly $1.3 billion in last year’s period.

• A surprise loss of $394 million, a $1.47 loss per share for the quarter, compared to net income of $65.6 million in last year’s period.

The firm has 12 products generating over $100 million on an annualized basis, with prediction markets being one of its “fastest growing products ever, on track on become the 13th product,” according to Coinbase’s presentation.

The earnings report comes in the same week CEO Brian Armstrong announced the firm is cutting 14% of its workforce, or about 700 employees, citing artificial intelligence and the need to adjust its cost structure amid a down market.