By the close of Circle Internet Group’s first trading day on Thursday, June 5, its stock had rocketed to $88, a 180% jump from the price institutional investors paid for their shares in the underwriting led by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup. The upshot: The company and insiders combined left a gigantic amount of money on the table by agreeing to a price far below what investors were willing to pay. As Fortune previously noted, that “left on the table” figure was the seventh largest in the history of all IPOs since 1980, exceeded only by the debuts of Visa, Airbnb, Snowflake, Rivian, DoorDash, and Coupang, the latter nicknamed “the Amazon of South Korea.”
Circle was just revving up. On Friday, June 6, its stock jumped another nearly 30% to $107.5. That additional leap hurtled the issuer for the USDC stablecoin to a historic record. Jay Ritter—a professor at the University of Florida and the world’s leading expert on IPOs—confirmed that for all go-public events since 1980 that raised $500 million or more, Circle’s two-day moonshot of nearly 250% ranks as by far the highest. The crypto favorite’s showing easily eclipsed the second place “pop” sounded by software provider C3.ai of 209% at its 2020 entry on the Nasdaq.
All told, Circle sold 39 million shares, raising $1.145 billion after underwriting fees of $67 million. Had the shares fetched the $107.5 close on June 6 instead of the $31 (excluding fees) paid in the presale by the likes of mutual and hedge funds, the company and insiders combined would have collected $4.144 billion. Hence, as of the second day of trading, the IPO had left a staggering $3 billion on the table. Put simply, for every $1 going to the sellers, $3 in two-day gains flowed to the underwriters’ Wall Street clients as a windfall.
At a market cap of $22 billion, Circle is selling at 140 times earnings. Given that treacherous valuation and the onslaught of stablecoin rivals invading its space, Circle is the epitome of an ultrahigh-risk stock. Money that might have been sitting in its treasury as a buffer against tough times vanished in this mind-bending spectacle that only the confluence of crypto craziness and Wall Street’s genius for underpricing IPOs could have staged.
