Despite all the chaos in crypto markets, quite a few stablecoins have survived. USD Coin from FinTech company Circle is one of the most popular. Now Circle has announced that it is expanding support for USDC with five new networks.
USDC now multi-chain
In a press release writes the stablecoin company that USDC can now also be used on Arbitrum One (a scaling protocol on Ethereum), Cosmos (ATOM), NEAR, Optimism (OP) and Polkadot (DOT). This brings the total number of supported networks to 14.
Ethereum (ETH) was the chain that introduced the token in 2018, Algorand (ALGO) and Solana (SOL) followed in 2020. An additional four blockchains followed last year, and earlier this year Circle brought USDC to Flow.
Further Circle announced yesterday that software developers now have a protocol at their disposal through Circle to move USDC from one blockchain to another. That was anything but easy before. This was possible at most through crypto exchanges that supported multiple networks, but that number was very limited. Most trading platforms now only support USDC on Ethereum.
Perhaps that will change soon. The tool lets developers destroy USDC on one network. Circle oversees this itself. A decentralized app (dApp) from an unnamed third party then mints the same amount at the corresponding wallet address on the ‘receiving’ blockchain.
1/ Another exciting announcement just shared at #ConvergeSF22 we intend #USDC to be available on @arbitrum @cosmos @NEARProtocol @optimismFND @polkadot pic.twitter.com/OKR8Scq6yY
— Circle | #ConvergeSF22 | Sept 27-30 (@circlepay) September 28, 2022
USDC must be A-class stablecoin
Circle is often in the news for trying hard to be the best boy in the class. And that’s quite something; Several major stablecoins have already lost their peg this year, including TerraUSD (UST), Tether’s USDT, Tron’s USDD and MakerDAO’s DAI. In fact, UST has gone all the way to zero after just being one of the fastest growing ecosystems.
To prevent that, Circle is working on the transparency of USDC. For example, it now publishes every month not only what the USDC collateral is worth, but also exactly what kind of collateral it is. Soon it even wants to do this every day.
