Circle's quarterly financial report is quite interesting. On the surface, it looks like they made $214 million, but if you dig deeper, there's quite a bit of fluff.

Out of that $214 million, $153 million is "one-time gains"—in other words, just paper profits, not actual cash earned.

So, the real net profit is only about $61 million.

Where did that $153 million come from? Mainly, it's from the appreciation of the USDC reserve fund shares that Circle holds. When the fair value of these investments goes up, it has to be counted as income on the financial report.

But there's something about this kind of non-recurring income: it might be there this quarter, but it could be gone the next. To see the company's true earning power, you still have to focus on the numbers after stripping out these one-off gains.