Circle reported 2026 second-quarter revenue and reserve income of $701 million before the U.S. market opened on Aug. 5, up 7% from a year earlier but below Wall Street consensus of roughly $713 million. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $143 million, up 8%, while diluted EPS was $0.18, above the expected $0.16. Net income reached $48.2 million, compared with a $482.1 million loss in the prior-year period, which the company said was largely due to a one-time stock-based compensation expense tied to its IPO in the second quarter of last year. USDC ending circulation stood at $73.3 billion, up 19% year over year, while on-chain transaction volume rose 151% to $14.8 trillion. Circle also highlighted new regulatory approvals, growth in CPN and Agent Stack, and the upcoming Sept. 16 public mainnet launch of Arc. On the earnings call, management said the Coinbase distribution agreement had been renewed on existing terms, discussed revenue sharing with Hyperliquid, and detailed ARC token presale figures, including about $242 million raised and roughly $180 million expected to be recognized as 2026 revenue.

Circle said its public Arc blockchain mainnet will go live on Sept. 16, and the company used its second-quarter earnings release to unveil a founding validator group dominated by traditional finance names. The list includes BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa, all joining Circle in securing the network. Circle said BlackRock is expected to bring its tokenized money market fund BUIDL to Arc, while DTCC plans to support tokenization of assets it custodies in the second half of 2027. The company also said Arc is already in private mainnet with more than 100 builders, and that its testnet has processed more than 500 million transactions across nearly 3 million wallets. On the earnings side, Circle reported $701 million in total revenue and reserve income, $48 million in net income, and a 19% rise in USDC circulation to $73.3 billion. It also said the OCC gave final approval for Circle National Trust and that its payments network reached $14.7 billion in annualized transaction volume.

Circle’s fiscal 2026 second-quarter report offered material for both bulls and bears. The stablecoin issuer posted $701 million in total revenue and reserve income, below the $717 million consensus, while net income from continuing operations came in at $48 million, ahead of the $43 million expected. USDC’s average circulation kept rising, but quarter-end supply fell to $73.3 billion from $77.0 billion in the prior quarter, and its share of dollar stablecoins slipped to 27%. The report also showed that reserve income remained the main earnings engine at $668 million, while “other revenue” rose sharply year over year but fell sequentially. Circle lifted its full-year outlook for that line to $310 million-$330 million, noting that the guidance includes recognized ARC token presale revenue. RLDC reached $289 million and RLDC margin held at 41%, supported by slower growth in distribution and transaction costs. On the business side, Circle set Sept. 16 for the Arc mainnet launch, named BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Visa, Mastercard and Standard Chartered among the initial validators, and reported continued expansion at Circle Payments Network. The company also said it had secured OCC approval to establish Circle National Trust, while its Circle New York Trust application was approved by NYDFS. Taken together, the quarter showed Circle still moving toward a platform model, but it did not settle the debate over whether that strategy can produce durable non-interest revenue.

Circle's Q2 earnings beat estimates one day after Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock, sending shares higher. The largest U.S. stablecoin issuer posted EPS of $0.21, above the $0.17 consensus, while revenue rose 20% year over year to $694 million, slightly missing the $715 million forecast. The market focused on Arc, Circle's blockchain network for stablecoin payments, tokenized assets, cross-border settlement and on-chain finance. Circle nearly doubled its full-year “other revenue” guidance to $310–330 million, with Arc as the main driver. Earlier this year, Circle raised $222 million through an ARC token presale at a $3 billion valuation. The report follows Morgan Stanley’s price target cut from $106 to $38 on shrinking USDC circulation. According to CoinDesk and Bloomberg, the earnings refocused attention from stablecoin concerns to Arc as a new growth story.

Bitcoin Magazine argues that the Coldcard security failure, while severe, does not invalidate self-custody as a core Bitcoin principle. The piece says a firmware bug affecting entropy generation left some private keys easier to guess than intended, with more than 1,300 BTC reportedly stolen and some estimates putting losses as high as 2,000 BTC. It also cites reports that over 11,000 BTC moved to custodial exchanges as shaken users pulled back from one of the industry’s best-known hardware wallets. From there, the article turns into a broader defense of private key ownership. It says Bitcoin cannot abandon self-custody without giving up part of the reason it exists: reducing reliance on trusted third parties. To make that case, the author links the current debate to the 2008 financial crisis, then goes further back to the 1933 U.S. gold confiscation order, arguing that centralized custody helped make seizure and monetary debasement easier. The essay presents Bitcoin as a form of digital gold built to survive that kind of pressure through tools such as multisignature storage, cross-jurisdictional key distribution, and the easier movement of large amounts of value. The article was written by Juan Galt and first appeared in Bitcoin Magazine.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used what the source describes as his second-ever X post to announce the Open Secure AI Alliance, a new coalition with 37 founding members spanning chipmakers, cloud companies, security firms, and open-source communities. The alliance argues that closed and open models should coexist, but says open models and testing harnesses are essential for cybersecurity work. The source draws a sharp contrast between the alliance roster and an earlier open-weight letter backed by 32 companies. Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Cisco, Dell, Hugging Face, IBM, Palantir, and SpaceXAI are described as backing both efforts. OpenAI and Google later signed the public letter but did not join the alliance. Anthropic, according to the report, did neither. The article also links the alliance’s case to a July security incident disclosed by Hugging Face and later claimed by OpenAI on July 21. In that account, commercial frontier models refused to analyze attack logs because of guardrails, while Hugging Face used the open-source model GLM 5.2 on its own infrastructure to review more than 17,000 actions and cut forensic work from days to hours. The source further argues that Nvidia’s push for open models also aligns with its interest in expanding the market for local GPU computing as major AI customers pursue in-house chips.

Crypto prices fell sharply in a broad sell-off, with Bitcoin at $70,427.61 and Ethereum down 6.2%. While major coins declined, several smaller tokens posted double- and triple-digit gains.

Cloudflare launches Email Service public beta with Email MCP server, Wrangler CLI, and open-source Agentic Inbox, enabling AI agents to asynchronously send and receive emails with zero DNS configuration.