USD Coin (USDC) has surpassed 3 billion in circulation, growing by nearly 500% in 2020, as global demand intensifies for a trusted, transparent, and fully reserved US dollar stablecoin issued by regulated financial institutions. Since launching in 2018, USDC has supported more than $230 billion in on-chain transactions, spanning diverse industries and use cases.
We believe that growing demand for USDC has been driven by a number of factors:
- Increasingly, financial institutions and businesses in nearly every industry sector are beginning to use dollar-backed stablecoins in payments, commerce, and treasury operations. They are attracted by unique attributes of these digital currencies, including near-instant settlement, low-cost global and interoperable transactions, irreversibility, lower counterparty risk, and 24/7 availability.
- Dollarization is fueling demand for dollar-based digital currencies. As many currencies strain under macro conditions and show increased volatility, individuals, businesses, and institutions are pursuing strategies to access US-dollar-dominated means of exchange. As such, demand for USDC has grown in a wide range of emerging markets across Latinm American, Asia, and Africa.
- Continued value to the trading use case where US dollar-backed stablecoins provide a critical piece of market infrastructure for trading and hedging use cases.
- DeFi lending and credit markets, which burst onto the scene earlier this year, leverage USDC as a lending and borrowing asset. These protocols recently surpassed $14 billion in value locked and continue to grow rapidly as demand for borrowing in stablecoins grows around the world.
“The accelerated growth of USDC over the course of this year is the result of our active work to establish an open standard for fiat digital currency on the internet,” said David Puth, Centre CEO. “This includes building a governance framework to evolve technical, policy, compliance, security and operational standards for the issuing and use of fiat digital currencies and stablecoins. Centre was founded by Circle and Coinbase to further advance these standards for USDC and for future Centre stablecoins. I fully expect that the adoption of USDC will continue to expand globally and that growth will continue at a very strong pace.”
USDC is the first fiat digital currency introduced by Centre Consortium, an organization co-founded by Circle and Coinbase. Centre has been actively working to establish an open standard for fiat digital currency on the internet, including a governance framework to evolve technical, policy, compliance, security, and operational standards for the issuing and use of fiat digital currencies and stablecoins.
In June, Centre announced a framework for multi-chain support of USDC so that the growing diversity of blockchains can leverage its foundation and standards for stablecoin enable financial and enterprise applications. USDC is now supported across a number of major public blockchains, including Ethereum, Algorand, and Solana, with support for Stellar arriving soon, making it one of the most widely adopted digital currencies in the world.
You can tokenize or redeem USDC with both Circle and Coinbase. To learn more about USDC visit here and you can go here to read the monthly reports on US dollar reserves backing USDC issued by independent accounting firm, Grant Thornton LLP.
USDC Stablecoin Surpasses 3 Billion in Circulation as Global Demand for Digital Dollars Continues was originally published in CENTRE blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.