Circle Shares Slide 16% as Insiders Sell and Short Sellers Hold Firm

CRCL, the stablecoin infrastructure company behind USDC, has lost 16% over the past week, closing at $72.54 on October 30 after a 9% single-day drop. That move is roughly twice the pace of decline seen across its closest correlated peers: MSTR fell 11% on the week and BMNR dropped 10%, suggesting CRCL is absorbing company-specific pressure on top of the broader crypto-risk selloff. Short interest, at 12% of the free float, has edged down 3.5% over the past week but is up 12% from a month ago, meaning bears built into this stock in October and have not yet fully unwound. Borrow availability is ample at 346%, nearly four shares available to lend for every one already borrowed, so the lending market is placing no squeeze pressure on the position. The put/call ratio at 0.76 is slightly below its 20-day average of 0.78, meaning options traders are, if anything, running somewhat lighter on downside hedges than usual rather than reaching for protection.

The bull case rests on USDC's scale and trajectory: circulation reached $75.3 billion in Q4 2025, up 72% year over year, and Circle captured nearly half of stablecoin transaction volume by that quarter. The Street's consensus price target of $107 implies roughly 48% upside from current levels, and Needham raised its target to $134 on October 21, maintaining a Buy. But the bear case is structural. Reserve yield revenues fall directly with interest rates, and Wolfe Research, which carries an Underperform, lifted its target only to $65 even after strong headline growth. Morgan Stanley's Underweight rating with a $37 target is the most bearish on the Street. The valuation gap between these camps is wide: the stock trades at a trailing PE near 51 and an EV/EBITDA of roughly 20, while the forward EPS momentum factor scores in the 5th percentile of the universe, meaning estimates have been moving lower.

The insider picture adds weight to the cautious read. Over the past 90 days, CRCL insiders have sold a net $9.8 million worth of stock across 116,000 shares. CEO Jeremy Allaire sold over $4.6 million on October 5 at prices between $82.75 and $85.24, when the stock was still above current levels. CFO Jeremy Fox-Geen sold $1.35 million on October 21 at $90. All of these transactions were conducted under pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans, which reduces the discretionary signal, but the volume and timing are notable: insiders were selling into prices that now look like the highs of this period. BlackRock added 3.3 million shares as of September 30, and ARK Investment Management added 1.6 million, so institutional appetite is not absent, but the CEO and CFO selling above $80 while the stock now trades at $72 frames the print with some awkwardness.

Wikipedia attention for CRCL has spiked sharply, with a retail-attention z-score of 3.5 against its own 90-day history as of October 30. That is a measure of public interest, not revenue, and ORTEX does not rate any of Circle's alt data series as having a measured lead on the company's reported figures. The stablecoin supply data is available daily, but its relationship to quarterly revenue has not been formally tested as a lead indicator in the ORTEX Alt Data framework.

Tuesday's print will test whether Circle's reserve revenue has compressed enough to matter at the EBITDA line, and whether USDC circulation growth is accelerating quickly enough to offset that yield drag at a stock price that has now retraced most of its post-IPO gains.