It’s noticeable that in today’s leading cryptocurrency press, i.e. Coindesk and Cointelegraph, the USDC, a Circle stablecoin, is receiving a lot of media attention.
Cointelegraph has a story based on recent Messari research, which has revealed that USDC is growing much faster than Tether in 2021 and is “emerging as the dominant stablecoin on Ethereum thanks to its popularity in DeFi.” The stablecoin has also taken a chunk of Tether’s market share, and researcher Ryan Watkins predicts that in the coming weeks, this could result in Tether’ share of the stablecoin supply on Ethereum falling below 50%.
Watkins also pointed out that half of the total USDC supply is now sitting in smart contracts and is worth around $12.5 billion. It has also become “the preferred dollar-pegged asset staked in smart contracts in DeFi protocols,” he says. Messari estimates that more than 40% of the stablecoin supply on Ethereum is USDC.
The USDC supply has surged by more than 1,820% since the beginning of 2021 when there was just 1.3 billion circulating and currently stands at about 25 billion, according to Circle’s figures.
One of USDC’s attractions now is a new product called Compound Treasury, which is offering 4% interest on USDC to institutions. Furthermore, This week Coinbase announced it would pay 4% interest on USDC holdings, giving the stablecoin a further boost.
More blockchains to adopt USDC
Meanwhile, over at Coindesk the focus is on USDC adoption by more blockchains. At the moment it is native to four blockchains, but the report says, “We anticipate that in the coming months USDC will become available on Avalanche, Celo, Flow, Hedera, Kava, Nervos, Polkadot, Stacks, Tezos, and Tron.” Following USDC’s launch in 2018, it expanded to Algorand, Stellar and Solana in 2020.
The USDC administrator, CENTRE, which is a consortium run by crypto exchange Coinbase and payments firm Circle, said expanding to other chains helps “drive individual and enterprise adoption of open blockchain technologies.” The announcement also said, “We anticipate that USDC on these blockchain platforms and multichain protocols will further accelerate the use of the world’s fastest growing digital dollar currency.”
The potential expansion to other blockchains follows announcements “showing momentum behind USDC as an interest-generating savings vehicle.”
Integration of USDC into other chains won’t happen immediately, but will probably be spaced out over the rest of this year.