USDC HITS $79B. YET CIRCLE KEEPS LESS OF THE PIE EVERY YEAR. Q1 2026: $694M in revenue. $407M paid out in distribution costs, up 17% YoY. Net income? Just $55M. That's a net margin of roughly 8%. Full year 2025 was worse: $2.7B in revenue and a net loss of $70M, driven largely by $424M in stock-based compensation tied to the IPO. USDC keeps growing. Distribution partners keep eating a bigger share of the yield every quarter. Now Hyperliquid takes it further. Its AQAv2 framework routes ~90% of reserve-yield revenue straight back to the protocol, not Circle. JPMorgan already flagged it as a near-term earnings headwind. Open USD launches with a model explicitly designed to route even more reserve income to distributors than Circle already keeps for itself. Scale isn't fixing Circle's margin problem. It's just making it more visible. https://cryptoslate.com/usdc-keeps-winning-but-circles-distributors-are-taking-more-of-the-prize/(Geralt Davidson 🐺)