Bernstein: Circle's Stock Price Could Surge Another 60%, Stablecoins and AI Agent Finance to Drive Growth

BlockBeats News, March 11th, brokerage firm Bernstein stated that the stablecoin issuer Circle (CRCL) still has room for growth in its stock price, giving it an "Outperform" rating and a target price of $190, representing about 60% upside potential from the current level of around $120. The stock had already risen over 100% in the weeks following better-than-expected earnings.

Analyst Gautam Chhugani pointed out that stablecoin growth is gradually decoupling from the cryptocurrency market cycle. Despite Bitcoin and the overall crypto market still being below their all-time highs, the USD Coin supply has rebounded to near its all-time high of around $78 billion, and the overall market capitalization of stablecoins is at around $270 billion.

The report stated that stablecoin trading activity is significantly increasing: adjusted stablecoin trading volume has grown by over 90% year-on-year, with transaction speeds increasing, indicating that their use cases are gradually expanding from crypto trading to the payment sector.

On the payment side, stablecoins are gradually integrating into traditional card network systems. Visa has already supported over 130 stablecoin-linked bank cards across 50 countries, with an annualized settlement scale of about $4.6 billion. In addition, Circle is expanding its cross-border settlement infrastructure, the Circle Payments Network, with approximately 55 institutions currently onboarded and an annualized transaction volume of around $5.7 billion.

Bernstein also noted that another potential growth theme in the future is "Agentic Finance." As autonomous software agents conduct transactions on the internet, stablecoins could become a natural settlement rail for micro-payments between machines, such as API calls or automated service payments. To support this direction, Circle is developing the high-throughput payment blockchain, Arc.