Circle introduces USD Coins (USDC)

Circle, a financial startup backed by Goldman Sach, which acquired Poloniex in February 2018, today announces the introduction of USD Coin (USDC) trading pairs to Poloniex.

What is USDC?

USD Coin (USDC) was initiated with the prtnership of Bitmain and its $110M Series E equity investment in Cicle in May 2018. It is a stablecoin, a token pegged to the US dollar.

USDC is an ERC-20 tokens minted, issued, and redeemed based on network rules defined by CENTRE. It will be easy to add support for USDC if you’re running an exchange or a wallet. Circle will only be the first issuing member of the CENTRE network, and further tokenized fiat stablecoins will be issued by other audited, licensed, participating network members. It also wants to make sure that issuers are not just printing money without any actual USD in their bank accounts.

USDC is a solution that enables customers to purchase and use USDC fiat tokens for payments and trading in the crypto ecosystem. USDC provides a full reserve US dollar-backed stablecoin, and is based on the open source fiat stablecoin framework developed and governed by CENTRE, which will provide independent oversight of Circle’s offering.

USDC deposits and withdrawals are currently live. Trading in BTC/USDC, ETH/USDC, and USDT/USDC pairs are enabled today, September 27th, 2018 at 10:00 ET.

"USDC is a fully collateralized US dollar stablecoin. By using Circle’s USDC issuance service, individual and institutional investors can deposit US dollars from bank accounts, convert those dollars into USDC tokens and send them to their Poloniex wallets to trade crypto assets. Conversely, customers can send USDC tokens from Poloniex to Circle’s USDC service and redeem the corresponding amount of US dollars", states the blog.

USD Coin is supported by investors IDG Capital, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Digital Currency Group, and Pantera, along with new investors Blockchain Capital and Tusk Ventures.

It is already accepted by Exchanges like KuCoin, DigiFinex, OkCoin, Poloniex and Wallets like Coinbase Wallet, CoolWallet S, Elph, imToken, Ledger, Trust Wallet.

Also read:

What is Stablecoin?

With the growth of crytocurrency adoption, a price stable currency aka stalecoin is vital for payments and trading. It is critical for enabling mainstream adoption of blockchain technology for payments as well as for supporting maturation in financial contracts built on smart contract platforms, such as tokenized securities, loans, and property. In simple words, stablecoin is like USD for cryptocurrency world, which is also backed by fiat (USD). Like the name suggest, it is not volatile and its value is always close to 1 USD.

1 USDC = 1 USD

With the growth of crypto, a few stablecoin are there in market. USDT, Maker DAI and now UDSC are a few to name. Stablecoin holds good in crypto-storm opens up possibilities for trading, hedging risk, lending and beyond and hence accepted among the community.