What’s Circle’s End Game, Robinhood Launches A Chain & Venice Raises $65M

Circle's stock fell roughly 17.5 percent on the day Stripe launched OpenUSD, an open stablecoin standard with design principles centered on scale, default yield sharing, and collaborative governance. The initiative is effectively Stripe's, run by Zach Abrams who founded Bridge before its Stripe acquisition, and launch partners include Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, Discover, BlackRock, Google, Shopify, Cloudflare, Solana, Coinbase, and roughly 150 others. Under the earned-by-default principle, partners receive all reserve earnings minus a small management fee, with no mint or redemption fees and no volume limits. Circle stock has fallen from 125 dollars to roughly 60 to 65 dollars in under two months, and the Stripe competitive threat was described as a poorly kept secret before the announcement.

The financial math is unfavorable for Circle. Adjusted operating expenses stripped of IPO costs run an estimated 500 to 600 million dollars annually, and 50 basis points on 10 billion dollars of stablecoin supply generates only around 50 million dollars per year. Yield sharing is not net new, as USDG on Paxos, Agora's AUSD, and Circle itself were already striking yield-sharing distribution deals, but the scale of the OpenUSD coalition raises the competitive pressure significantly. Circle's high operating costs partly reflect its attempt to transform from an issuance company into a payments company by building ecosystem tooling that Stripe already possesses. Neither speaker was willing to take a long or short position on Circle, calling it a wait-and-see moment, though they noted the stock decline makes acquisitions harder at a time when Circle should be acquisitive rather than building organically.

Skepticism about the consortium's prospects was significant. No consortium of this size has a clear historical precedent for success, and several prior stablecoin consortiums have failed, including Circle itself starting as a consortium before cutting members out. The prediction was that the vast majority of the 150-plus member companies added their logos for press coverage and will not actively further OpenUSD adoption. Stripe and Visa were identified as the parties most aligned with the initiative's success and most likely to warehouse the majority of its costs, alongside Tempo, which is already doing deployed engineering with many companies on the open standard list. USDC remains the backbone of on-chain activity including Hyperliquid trades, Uniswap trades, and deposits on Aave and Morpho, and the head of stablecoins at Ramp argued OpenUSD targets interoperability with payment service providers and banks rather than the on-chain liquidity market where USDC is dominant. Banks were characterized as a more serious long-term competitive threat to Circle than Stripe because the larger stablecoin use cases including Treasury management, capital markets, and clearing are areas banks dominate.

Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum-based L2 featuring tokenized stocks including NVIDIA, Apple, and Google available in 120 countries, onchain DeFi via Uniswap and Morpho, agentic AI trading, Chainlink as oracle, and 90 days of zero gas fees. Hood stock rose approximately 8 to 9 percent on the announcement day and was up 20 percent over the prior five days. Multiple chains competed to host Robinhood Chain and incentives were likely involved in the selection. This is the first observed instance where application founders are negotiating to be featured on a chain rather than chains paying applications to join, with the three protocols featured most prominently being Lighter, Morpho, and Arculus, the rebranded DYDX V2 infrastructure rebuild. Robinhood is adding 20 million dollars in LIT token incentives for wallet users, and the earned product inside the wallet is currently yielding 7 percent, with a significant portion of that yield coming from Morpho token incentives. Speakers predicted that in a couple of years Robinhood and Coinbase will have many trading pairs settling directly onchain, and that both companies along with Kraken may incubate or acquire decentralized exchanges to own more of the stack.

Cloudflare, which handles approximately 20 to 21 percent of all HTTP requests on the internet and processes about 100 million requests per second, announced a monetization gateway allowing any website, dataset, API, or MCP tool behind Cloudflare to charge per request settled in stablecoins over the X402 open protocol. Cloudflare reported that for the first time the majority of its internet traffic was agentic, though actual transaction volumes for agentic commerce remain very small despite significant hype. Stablecoins are considered better suited than cards for agent-to-agent transfers and micro-transactions, and one speaker predicted all card settlement will eventually migrate to stablecoins over time.

Venice, a permissionless and censorship-resistant AI platform founded by Erik Voorhees, raised 65 million dollars in a Series A valued at approximately 1 billion dollars, its only outside fundraise to date. Venice launched its token from nearly day one rather than following the conventional fundraising-to-token sequence, and its stated model uses subscription and Vernet revenue to buy back the token. The token was designed so that staking it yields another token representing pre-purchased compute power intended to hedge future compute costs. Voorhees bootstrapped the company, fair launched the token, and reached significant scale before taking outside capital, and when he needed to raise capital for a data center he did so without issuing additional tokens into the market.