Binance Takes a $100M Circle Stake Under a Five-Year USDC Deal

Binance has bought $100 million of Circle stock and signed a five-year agreement to promote USDC. The exchange took 1,237,011 Class A shares at $80.84 each in a private placement that closed on 17 September, according to the filing described by The Block, Decrypt and Cointelegraph. CoinDesk rounds the count to 1.24 million shares. Circle's own announcement on Tuesday gives no share count at all and says only that the price was a 5% discount to the market before closing. The shares cannot be sold or hedged for two years.

Who pays whom

The fee terms are the part the reports split on. The Block quotes the filing: Circle agreed to pay Binance a monthly incentive fee based on a percentage of the USDC held through the wallet service, which is Circle's Modular Smart Contract Wallet infrastructure. Decrypt, CoinDesk and Cointelegraph describe the same direction of travel, with money going from Circle to Binance. Benzinga has it the other way, saying Circle will receive fees tied to USDC held through Binance's platform. Both cannot be right. Three outlets and the quoted filing text sit on one side. The percentage itself is disclosed nowhere.

What Binance agreed to do

Circle's announcement lists what it is buying: wider USDC access in emerging markets, promotion and integration of the token across Binance, and infrastructure services from Circle for holding and using it. The emerging-markets line follows a year of Circle spending in that direction, including its agreement to buy the Singapore payments firm Tazapay this month.

"A stable, trusted digital dollar should not be a privilege," Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said in the announcement. It should be "available to anyone with a phone."

Jeremy Allaire, Circle's co-founder and chief executive, put the deal in terms of using USDC to "expand dollar access." The token's circulating supply is about $75 billion. usdc.org, citing CoinGecko for Tuesday, counted 74.84 billion tokens; CoinGecko's own page showed 75.28 billion on Wednesday. Those readings are hours apart, not methods apart.

Third version of the same partnership

The two companies have done this twice before. The new agreement supersedes ones from November 2024 and August 2025, as Decrypt, Benzinga and Cointelegraph all report; The Block gives the years without the months. The lock-up runs two years from closing and bars sale, transfer and hedging, with exceptions for affiliate transfers, court-ordered disposals and approved takeovers, Decrypt says. Binance keeps its voting rights throughout. If it terminates the commercial agreement on the grounds the filing specifies, the lock-up can end early. The Block sets the deal beside Circle's Arc network, whose mainnet opened with USDC as the gas token last week.

On paper the stake is worth more than it cost. CRCL closed the previous session at $94.29 and added about 1.3% in premarket trade on Tuesday, Cointelegraph said; Benzinga had the stock flat at $94.33 that day. Decrypt alone puts the unrealized gain on Binance's position near $16.9 million and notes that CRCL is down roughly 34% over a year. Both of those figures come from one outlet.

What the filing leaves out

Without the fee percentage, the cost of the promotion to Circle cannot be worked out from public documents. Neither company has said how much USDC sits on Binance now, and neither has set a target for it. The commercial agreement runs into 2031 on its face, though each side can leave earlier on specified grounds. The lock-up on the shares expires in September 2028 unless that happens first.