According to Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), scalability solutions are crucial to the widespread adoption of the largest smart contract network today. This reduces congestion on Ethereum, resulting in lower transaction costs. Arbitrum is one of the scalability solutions on Ethereum that, as far as Total Value Locked (TVL) is the absolute market leader of all layer-2s on Ethereum.
Arbitrum has now teamed up with Circle, the publisher of the popular USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin. Does this take Arbitrum adoption to the next level?
USDC on Arbitrum
On June 8, Circle announced that it was a native version of its USDC on the Arbitrum network. With this, Arbitrum can call itself the ninth blockchain to support USDC.
Native USDC has landed in the Arbitrum ecosystem! Welcome @circle 💙🧡
For more details 👉 https://t.co/lZG4kdNXZa https://t.co/3L9FzMp4e2
— Arbitrum (💙,🧡) (@arbitrum) June 8, 2023
Native USDC is officially issued by Circle and is always 1:1 convertible to US dollars.
However, users could already get exposure to USDC before the collaboration through a so-called bridge. A bridge connects blockchains together and in the case of USDC you could ‘bridge’ from Ethereum to Arbitrum. The bridged version of USDC, which will be called ‘USDC.e’ from now on, will now gradually be replaced by the native version running on the Arbitrum network itself:
According to data from Arbiscan The total supply of USDC on Arbitrum has already reached a total of more than 69 million USDC.
Companies that have an account with Circle can now access Arbitrum USDC and can “easily swap between supported blockchains – avoiding the costs and delays associated with bridges,” according to Circle’s official Twitter account.
Arbitrum the absolute leader in terms of TVL
According to data from DeFiLlama Arbitrum has a big advantage in terms of TVL over all other scaling solutions on Ethereum. In total, $ 2.1 billion would be tied up in the network, which is significantly higher than both Polygon (MATIC) and Optimism (OP) with $ 868.36 million and $ 802.7 million, respectively.
In fact, Arbitrum is currently the fourth largest network when it comes to TVL, right behind BNB Chain (BNB), Tron (TRX) and Ethereum.