Share
Wall Street’s most bullish analyst on stablecoins just doubled down and the market is listening.
Bernstein analyst Gautam Chhugani reiterated an “Outperform” rating on Circle Internet Group (NASDAQ: CRCL) on Tuesday (March 10, 2026), maintaining a Street-high $190 price target.
The call implies roughly 70% upside from Monday’s closing price – remarkable timing, given that the stock had already more than doubled in the previous five weeks.
Bernstein raised its Circle price target to $191 from $111, implying ~70% upside.
Analysts point to AI as a potential catalyst, with Circle positioning USDC as infrastructure for “agentic commerce.”
Other highlights:
• Stablecoin volume hit $55T in 2025 (+98% YoY)
• Adjusted… pic.twitter.com/VQlfZPDCdr— Frank Chaparro (@fintechfrank) March 10, 2026
Circle shares have surged about 49% year to date, dramatically outperforming a flat S&P 500 and a roughly 1% decline in the Nasdaq 100 over the same period.
CRCL staged a V-shaped reversal off late-January lows near $55, surging nearly 110% in roughly five weeks, reclaiming its key moving averages in rapid succession before breaking cleanly above a descending trendline from November highs.
The shares closed Tuesday at $118.17, up 5.7%, giving the company a market capitalization of roughly $30.3B. Notably, Bernstein’s report validated a rally already underway – it didn’t cause it.
The most striking element of Bernstein’s argument isn’t a financial model – it’s a market observation.
USDC supply, at the time of writing, stands near $78B, an all-time high, even though Bitcoin is still about 44% below its peak. The total value of dollar-backed stablecoins has reached about $270B, also a record level.
Total stablecoin transaction volume hit $55T in 2025, up 98% year-over-year. The adjusted figure, stripping out bots and high-frequency trading, reached $11 trillion, growing 91%. Payment activity alone totaled roughly $375B in 2025, up 76% from the prior year.
In short: stablecoins are no longer a crypto phenomenon, but they have become a payments phenomenon.
Consumer-to-business payments rose 131% year-over-year, helped by the spread of stablecoin-linked cards, such as Visa cards that run on stablecoin payment rails.
Visa now supports over 130 stablecoin-linked cards across 50 countries. The Circle Payments Network operates cross-border corridors spanning the US, EU, Singapore, India, and the Philippines, with about 55 institutions enrolled and an annualized volume of $5.7B as of February 2026.
None of those metrics move with Bitcoin’s price. They move with global commerce.
Bernstein’s most speculative, and potentially most consequential, argument involves machines, not humans.
The use case is straightforward: autonomous AI systems that call external APIs, purchase data, or pay for compute resources need a payment layer that operates programmatically without human intervention. Traditional payment rails require authorization flows designed for human users. Stablecoins operating on smart contract infrastructure do not.
Circle has already launched a product called Nanopayments to position for this future. Bernstein notes that nanopayments are in early days, and that low volumes today reflect the fact that agentic AI workflows are still nascent, but the firm is pricing in the optionality now, before the revenue materializes.
Bernstein projects a 47% compound annual revenue growth rate through 2027, and its $190 price target is built on that CAGR combined with a category-leadership premium valuation.
The street isn’t fully on board – the consensus average 12-month price target among 16 analysts sits at $114.29, with eight Buys, seven Holds, and one Sell. Bernstein’s $190 target stands alone at the top.
But the broader message from this call is hard to dismiss: stablecoins have quietly become one of the fastest-growing corners of global finance and Circle, for now, sits at the center of it all.
Share
