Circle continues to make progress on its USDC stablecoin.

USDC started on the Ethereum blockchain in 2018 in collaboration with Coinbase and Circle, a long-established US cryptocurrency company. Coinbase and Circle are companies with excellent reputations that generally enjoy a very high level of trust among those who follow the cryptocurrency market. USDC has proven to provide protection against sharp exchange rate fluctuations in the cryptocurrency market, and its popularity has been growing steadily since its inception.

The growth in USDC’s popularity has been driven by the sharp increase in Defi services that began in 2020 and the resulting growth in the interest rate market for cryptocurrencies, and the uncertainties surrounding the dollar reserves of another popular stablecoin, Tether. The USDC’s strong position and reliability is also reflected in the fact that, in March 2021, payment services giant Visa announced that it would accept the USDC as a payment method for its online payments.
USDC at the moment is the second highest volume stable coin in the crypto world, the blockchain platforms where the coin currently operates are the following:

• Ethereum
• Solana
• Avalanche
• Polygon
• TRON
• Algorand
• Flow
• Hedera
• Stellar.

The company’s chief product officer, Nikhil Chandhok, announced the news to a live audience at Circle’s Converge22 conference on September 28. Shortly thereafter, the team also announced the news on Twitter:
“Another exciting announcement we just shared at ConvergeSF22. We intend to make USDC available on Arbitrum, Cosmos, NEAR, Optimism and Polkadot.”
All four Blockchains will be available for trading by the end of 2022 with the exception of Cosmo which is planning to join early next year.

It is worth noting that it has also been on other platforms such as Binance, which was one of the first to withdraw USDC from its trading peers, claiming it was doing so to improve liquidity and capital efficiency. Shortly thereafter, so did India’s WazirX. However, Robinhood has also recently included USDC in its offerings, making it the first stablecoin to be added to the company’s cryptocurrency platform.

Cross-chain transfer protocol announced.

The company also announced the upcoming release of an Inter-Chain Transfer Protocol for the stablecoin that will improve its movement across blockchains. The current “fragmented” process will be streamlined and developers will be supported by the protocol when creating wallets, apps and financial services tools that facilitate the seamless transfer of USDC between blockchains.
Reginatto(vice president of USDC product) also said:
“The Cross-Blockchain Transfer Protocol ultimately allows USDC to function as a universal dollar liquidity layer across ecosystems, providing the most capital-efficient way to transport value across the crypto ecosystem.”

Advantages and disadvantages of USDC over other stablecoins.

The main advantage of this project over other stablecoins is that being an ERC-20 token, it is quite common to see it listed on DApps or DEX in the Ethereum ecosystem. Compatibility at this point is assured with these applications, so, if there is a larger audience able to use it, greater will be its recognition, its liquidity in the markets and therefore its fungibility will be better assured.

The ERC-20 token is easy to integrate with wallets, so you can find support for these cryptocurrencies in most of the wallets that exist in the crypto world.

On the negative side, this project is still a centralized model, where the trust falls on a number of individuals who may not be exactly transparent with the management of coin reserves. This is a very big risk when we are talking about billions of dollars, which can disappear at any moment due to any action in the traditional financial world. A risk that those who bet on this project should be aware of before deciding to enter this world of stablecoins.

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