Company: CRCL
Filing Date: 2025-08-12
Form Type: S-1
Source: 0001193125-25-178989
Chunk: 58

Company: Circle Internet Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-08-12
Form: S-1
Chunk 58
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coin ecosystem” for examples of partners and parties in the Circle stablecoin ecosystem. Specifically, our offering of the payments, payout, and wallet services depends on our ability to offer card transaction processing, ACH transaction processing, and wire transfer processing services to our customers. In order to provide such transaction processing services, we have established relationships with financial institutions whereby such institutions sponsor us into the relevant payment networks (e.g., the card networks and the ACH). Our ability to offer these services depends on our ability to maintain existing sponsorship relationships and to establish new sponsorship relationships. Our regulatory status, recent statements by the U.S. federal banking agencies, and the status of Circle stablecoins and digital assets more generally may be an impediment to our ability to receive or obtain sponsorships from financial institutions, such as Mastercard and Visa. As our industry develops and becomes subject to increasing scrutiny, this risk may increase as well. Should our sponsorship partners cease providing such sponsorship, we would be at risk of being unable to provide the payment processing services that are core to our customer offering.

Third parties upon which we rely to process transactions may refuse to process transactions adequately, breach their agreements with us, refuse to renew agreements on commercially reasonable terms, take actions that degrade the functionality of our services, impose additional costs or requirements on us, or give preferential treatment to our competitors. Some third parties that provide services to us may have or gain market power and be able to increase their prices to us without competitive constraint. In addition, there can be no assurance that third parties that provide services directly to us will continue to do so on acceptable terms, or at all, or will not suffer from outages to their systems. If any third parties were to stop providing services to us on acceptable**

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**terms, we may be unable to procure alternatives from other third parties in a timely and efficient manner and on acceptable terms, or at all, which may materially and adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial condition, and prospects.

We are subject to credit risks in respect of counterparties, including banks and other financial institutions.

We are and will continue to be subject to the risk of actual or perceived deterioration of the commercial and financial soundness, or perceived soundness, of other financial institutions, especially banks holding reserves of Circle stablecoins. This is particularly the case in relation to receivables regarding settled payment transactions, and with respect to cash and cash equivalents held at financial institutions. We regularly maintain cash balances at banks in excess of