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0 CommentsCircle, the company behind the second-largest stablecoin USDC, announced on Sept. 28 that it will soon expand USDC support on five additional blockchains. Furthermore, the company announced a Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol to streamline the movement of USDC across networks.
As the company’s CPO Nikhil Chandhok revealed at Circle’s Converge22 conference, USDC will be compatible with Arbitrum, Cosmos, NEAR, Optimism, and Polkadot by the next year.
Joao Reginatto, Circle’s VP of Product, said that “the multi-chain expansion is intended to increase USDC’s native availability from eight ecosystems to thirteen,” before adding that it “enables blockchain developers building on USDC and their users to experience greater liquidity and interoperability within the crypto economy.”
After the launch, developers could use Circle APIs for fiat on and off-ramps to and from USDC in their products, as well as programmable wallet infrastructure, the team said on Twitter.
Per the company’s statement, USDC is going to function on Arbitrum, NEAR, Optimism, and Polkadot by the end of the year. Compatibility with Cosmos is expected to launch by early 2023.
This expansion will soon bring the total number of USDC-compatible blockchains to 14. The coin is already operable on Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, TRON, Algorand, Flow, Hedera, and Stellar.
This July, Circle released a detailed yet unaudited breakdown of its reserve assets for the firm’s USD Coin (USDC), showing $42.1 billion in short-term US government bonds and $13.6 billion in cash.
USDC supply has been on the decline over the past three months. Since the beginning of July, it has shrunk by 12.5%, as a deepening bear market and diminished demand for DeFi have resulted in a decline in stablecoin usage.
