Circle Files for IPO

Circle has hired JPMorgan and Citi to lead its planned IPO. Plus the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem.

Author

Ryan Allis
April 02, 2025

Social Links: Twitter | Telegram | Newsletter

Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, the weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors and industry insiders. We review the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem for our 315,000 weekly subscribers. This week Circle hired its bankers for its long-awaited IPO, the FDIC shifted its stance on digital assets, Grayscale's proposed an Avalanche ETF, and big venture news came in for Abound ($14M) and Warlock ($8M).

Price performance since we began writing Coinstack in January 2021

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💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals

Here are all the crypto fundraises we heard about this week, ranked by size…

🗞️ Crypto News Recap: The Top 5 Stories

Welcome back to This Week in Crypto… everything you need to know in one scannable format. Here are the top 5 stories of the week…

  1. 🚀 Circle hires banks for long-awaited IPO, stablecoin giant expected to publicly file late April: Circle has reportedly hired JPMorgan and Citi to lead its planned IPO, which could come prior to June, reported Fortune.

  1. ⚖️ FDIC shifts stance on digital assets and will allow financial institutions to engage in crypto activities without getting prior sign-off:The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is taking a new approach under the Trump administration toward digital assets and is turning back standards requiring financial institutions to notify the agency before engaging in crypto-related activities.

  1. ⚖️ Nasdaq files 19b-4 with SEC to list and trade shares of Grayscale's proposed Avalanche ETF:Nasdaq filed a 19b-4 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday to list and trade shares of Grayscale's spot Avalanche exchange-traded fund.

  1. 📉 Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP Fall to Weekly Lows as Liquidations Spike Above $450 Million:Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies are in the red Friday, with top coins falling to their lowest prices in at least a week as stock markets are similarly rattled by hotter-than-expected inflation data.

💬 Tweet of the Week

Source: @milesdeutscher

📊 Key Stats of the Week

Here are the most important and interesting stats in crypto this week...

1. Quietly, borrowing and lending activity on Maple Finance has surged to record levels over the past year as the protocol now manages $330M in active loans and $790M in deposits. Overall, net deposits into Maple have grown by 652% while active loans have increased by 339%.

More borrowing, more lending, more opportunities for efficient capital allocation. The onchain economy continues to march forward.

Source: @DavidShuttleworth

2. Multichain Thesis in Action — Number of Active Chains on Jumper has Tripled Since Last Tear While Transaction Median Time was divided by 10

Source: @OurNetwork

3. Squid is Cross-Chain’s Highway — to Beat the ‘One-and-Done’ Trap However, It Must Be the Destination, Not Just the Bridge.

Source: @OurNetwork

4. LI.FI Crosses $22B in All-Time Volume, ~32M Transactions, 4.4M Users

Source: @OurNetwork

5. Ethereum Leads Wormhole Staking, Base is Growing Fast, Arbitrum & Optimism Lag as Delegation is Concentrated Among Key Players

Source: @OurNetwork

📝 Highlights from the Top Crypto Reports

Here are the top highlights from the best crypto research reports this week…

About the Author: OurNetwork, iaims to help you understand crypto like never before by harnessing the power of onchain data & analytics. This is an excerpt from the full article, which you can find here.

📝 Editor’s Note:

Welcome to the latest edition of OurNetwork.

In this issue, we're zooming in on bridging, a space which has been trending up and to the right — bridges have generated daily average volumes of $677M year-to-date in 2025, according to DeFiLlama. That's up nearly double from the $344M daily average in 2024 and over four times the 2022 daily average of $151M in cross-chain volume.

That said, and as the OurNetwork analysts outline below, many individual bridges are struggling to maintain rates of growth in a competitive market.

Let's dig in.

– ON Editorial Team

📈 Stargate Has Successfully Bridged 5.5M Transactions Amounting to $2.15B+ in Volume Over the Past Year

✏️Editor's Note: The year calculated here is Mar. 1 2024 through Mar. 1 2025

Stargate Finance is a cross-chain liquidity protocol that enables seamless token transfer between blockchains like Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Scroll, etc. The protocol has facilitated 5.5M transactions in cross-chain transfers in the past year, which have amounted to $2.1B in total volume. Stargate onboarded 499k unique users in this time frame, indicating the ongoing demand for cross-chain transfers.

Arbitrum and Ethereum are top in bridge volume with $572M and $386M respectively, while Polygon, Avalanche, and Optimism have moderate volumes, and BNB Chain and Base see the least activity. Arbitrum's lead in bridge volume shows adoption of Layer 2s (L2s) as an improvement to Ethereum.

Just like any other protocol in crypto, one major challenge is retaining users after onboarding, which we see in the user retention breakdown over the past 12 months. In March 2024, retention was 33% in the first month, but that quickly declined to 18% in the second month and 13% in the third month.

🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week

Here are the crypto podcasts that are worth listening to this week...

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📰 The Coinstack Newsletter:

Tracking the most important blockchain stories of the 2020s, including a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone. As always, published for informational purposes only. Please do your own research. Just our opinions. Not intended as financial advice as we are not financial advisors. We may own some of the digital assets we write about as we believe strongly in the sector. Please do your own research. Published and written weekly by Ryan Allis and Mike Gavela.

Coinstack is a news and analysis newsletter for the digital asset industry. None of the information here is a recommendation to invest in any securities or other types of investments. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Any historical returns, expected returns, or probability projections may not reflect actual future performance. All investments involve risk and may result in loss.

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