If you only look at the financial statements, you will find that the bulk of Circle’s revenue is still based on the same old logic: use the US dollars in the hands of users to buy U.S. bonds and earn interest on it. If Circle were just a "U.S. debt agent," the stock price simply wouldn't be able to support such a rise. Smart Money is obviously not paying for past interest. There must be some other reason. What really excited institutional investors in the financial report was the latest progress of Circle’s Arc network and CPN (Circle Payment Network). What is more attractive than charging interest is charging gas fees! Circle expects the issuance of USDC to grow by 40% annually in the future, and future gas fees will have endless potential with the development of crypto payments! Arc started public beta as early as October 28 last year. As of February 20, more than 100 banks and payment giants have participated in the Arc test network. Currently, Arc can achieve 0.5 second-level settlement, 100% availability, and an average daily transaction volume of 2.3 million transactions.This is no longer a demo in the laboratory, but has industrial-grade performance that challenges Visa. The official plan is to launch Arc on the mainnet in 2026. If Arc is a "highway" (underlying blockchain) built by Circle, then Circle Payments Network (CPN) is the "toll station, entrance and exit, and logistics center" on this road. Simply put, CPN is a set of payment infrastructure (API driven) provided by Circle that integrates the traditional banking system and blockchain technology.Its core mission is to solve a century-old problem: how to seamlessly convert and complete payments between “fiat currency in the bank” and “digital currency on the chain”. The current trend is obvious: leading stablecoin issuers must build their own “highway”. Circle has Arc; Tether also has its own Stable and Plasma chains. The reason is simple: Only by mastering the underlying Layer1 can we achieve self-determined gas fees (pay directly with USDC), fully controllable compliance, and absolute autonomy in asset settlement. The implementation of applications in the encryption industry has always been limited, and the core scenario at present is: stable currency (payment). At present, the core indicator used by major public associations to evaluate TVL is the market value of stable coins! Now, the biggest players in this scene (stablecoin issuers) are “fleeing” collectively, taking away the best assets and application scenarios: When USDC transfers all occur on Arc, and USDT settlement all occurs on Stable/Plasma, general public chains such as Ethereum will not only lose their core gas source, but the future on-chain capital market and AI Agent narrative will also have nothing to do with these public chains. In the future, whether it is asset tokenization) or other financial assets, once a leading project comes out, for the sake of compliance and efficiency, it will definitely follow Circle: stand on its own and build its own ecosystem. If Ethereum loses the ballast of "stable currency settlement", it will basically become a meme chain. Circle's stock price has soared, not because it charged three to five dollars more in interest, but because it proved that it is changing from a "currency issuer" to a new global financial hegemon that "opens banks + builds railways." After all, wealthy people still believe in SEC supervision more than these "decentralized" nodes.