The Centre Consortium has announced that USD Coin or USDC is now using Algorand – the second major blockchain after Ethereum to offer native support for the stablecoin.
The Centre Consortium was founded by Circle and Coinbase – the creators of USDC which was announced in 2018. Centre was formed with a mission of creating a global standard for fiat based digital currency that can be exchanged with very little friction and at speed. Centre wants to ensure that its stablecoin standards, formats and protocols work across multiple major blockchain platforms.
So why is this important? Using Algorand will help boost speed and scale – something that is important when you are talking about payments and financial applications.
Algorand is said to bring over 1,000 tps and transaction fees of 1/20th of a cent to the USDC ecosystem – far better than Ethereum. Future improvements include the potential of scaling throughput by 8-10x on Layer 1, accompanied by new secure smart contracts for tokens.
USDC has grown rapidly with over 1.8 billion in circulation jumping by 3x in the past 6 months.
Earlier this year, Centre announced its Multichain USDC Framework, an effort to increase interoperability. The Centre Multichain USDC Framework is said to establish a “rigorous set of criteria for the issuance and operation of USDC on new blockchains, while also supporting innovation and experimentation by third-party developers and blockchain platforms.”
Centre reports that it has been encouraged by the growing interest in using USDC within regulated financial institution settings.
Silvio Micali, founder of Algorand, called USDC on Algorand a defining milestone for frictionless payments as well as sophisticated financial applications:
“This launch brings together the convenience of USDC and an advanced protocol for global financial exchange in which Layer-1 smart contracts are as simple and secure as ordinary payments.”
Alesia Haas, Chief Financial Officer at Coinbases, said expanding USDC beyond Ethereum will ensure USDC has the ability to support a diverse range of services in DeFi or large financial service firms.
“Today’s launch represents a significant improvement to USDC’s scalability, improving its utility and making it a significantly more useful protocol for solving real-world financial problems,” said Haas.”We look forward to supporting USDC on Algorand for both our retail and institutional customers in the future.”
Jeremy Allaire, Chairman and CEO of Circle, said that Algorand has been at the forefront of scalable blockchain:
“Algorand’s focus on providing capabilities that are geared towards regulated financial institutions is also important as digital dollar stablecoins such as USDC become a core market infrastructure in the financial services industry more broadly.”