Issuers of USD Coin (USDC) have announced that they will soon deploy their stablecoin on five additional networks, including Polkadot, Optimism, NEAR, Arbitrum, and Cosmos..
The company first broke the news at the Converge22 event on September 28, noting that support for most of these blockchains will be rolled out by the end of 2023.while USDC on Cosmos will go live in early 2023.
In a September 28 statement, Circle’s VP of Product, Joao Reginatto highlighted that the expansion of USDC will provide “greater liquidity and interoperability within the crypto economy”, in particular the commercial sector..
“Expanding multi-chain support for USDC opens the door for institutions, exchanges, developers, and more to innovate and have easier access to a reliable and stable digital dollar,” he said..
3/ Upon launch, developers will be able to use Circle APIs for fiat on/off-ramps to and from USDC in their products, as well as programmable wallets infrastructure.
— Circle | #ConvergeSF22 | Sept 27-30 (@circlepay) September 28, 2022
3/ Upon launch, developers will be able to use Circle APIs for fiat on/off ramps to and from USDC in their products, as well as programmable wallet infrastructure.
In a follow-up interview with Cointelegraph, Reginatto outlined that while Circle initially built USDC on Ethereum because there was more development and activity there, it always had a vision that the future would be a “multi-chain world.”.
As such, Circle is expanding USDC support on the premise that developers prefer interoperability to working with a single network:
“We already knew at the time that there was a lot of exciting stuff going on in other ecosystems, and we think over time app developers and builders aren’t going to be as concerned about the Layer 1 or Layer 2 infrastructure they’re using.”
“They will want interoperability, they will want flexibility to be able to port their solutions across ecosystems,” he added..
Reginatto pointed out that, Although Circle is pushing to expand USDC support, given the current size of the stablecoin — with a market cap of $48.9 billion — the firm will not launch behind just any network..
He stressed that Circle conducts a great deal of due diligence before selecting the next blockchain to work with.
“There are a lot of risks that we have now that maybe we didn’t have two or three years ago. So we take it very diligently. We have a team of people across all functions of the company that assess all of these ecosystems and prioritize them over time.” .
Once the additional support is officially rolled out, USDC will be available on a total of 13 blockchains.. By comparison, Circle’s main competitor, Tethercurrently lists USDT support for eight networks on its website.
“After launch, developers will be able to use Circle APIs for fiat to USDC on-ramps and off-ramps in their products, as well as programmable wallet infrastructure”Circle stated on Twitter.
Commenting on the use cases for USDC and stablecoins in the current cryptocurrency context, Reginatto highlighted key avenuessuch as market payments, remittances, and global settlements for financial institutions.
“There is no real good interoperability between all these banking systems and regional rails. Stablecoins have a very, very good value proposition for that.”
“Stripe uses USDC rails for market payments. Incorporate this as part of your marketplace payment products, simply so you can reach the people your customers need to pay, that traditional rails can’t reach. So there is clear concrete value that the substrate can offer for those kinds of use cases,” he added..
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