- USDC will launch on five new blockchains by early 2023, Circle has announced
- Cosmos, Near and Polkadot are among the chains that will have USDC added to them
- USDC lost ground to other stablecoins since Binance announced it was ceasing support
Circle may have seen its USDC coin essentially delisted from Binance and Wazirx, but the company still has big plans for its expansion. Speaking at the Converge22 conference in Seville yesterday, Joao Reginatto, VP of product at Circle, announced five new blockchains onto which USDC will be expanding, adding that its growth goes hand in hand with a shift from speculation to utility in the crypto market. His bullish comments come after USDC has spent the last three months drifting away from stablecoin giant Tether in the market cap stakes, having gained considerable ground over the past couple of years.
Crypto Space is Moving From Speculation to Utility
Allaire was speaking at Converge22 alongside co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire on the subject of the changing nature of the crypto space, where the pair discussed Circle’s mission to help boost this new utility-focused blockchain space. This would be aided, the pair added, by Circle’s presence on five new blockchains – Arbitrum, Cosmos, Near, Optimism, and Polkadot – which they hoped would be in place by early 2023.
Reginatto explained the purpose of such expansion, saying that it would allow Circle to expand its stablecoin from eight ecosystems to 13, allowing its users to have “greater liquidity and interoperability” when carrying out their operations.
Reginatto added that in order to change the ecosystem from a profit-based one to one that is actually used by people requires creating simple applications for all users, regardless of their level of cryptocurrency knowledge, saying that users “don’t need to know what chain they’re on or even what stablecoin they’re using.”
USDC Losing Ground in Stablecoin Race
USDC had been enjoying a great first half of 2022, outpacing USDT by some distance and closing the gap to it as the world turned away from the biggest stablecoin over fears of its backing. However, the second half of the year has been far less buoyant – USDC has slowly begun to cede market cap to USDT again, shedding $7 billion as USDT has begun to reclaim the holders it lost.
Part of the reason behind USDC’s reversal is because of the decision by Binance, and to a lesser extent Indian exchange Wazirx, to auto-convert USDC to Binance’s BUSD and remove all trading pairs. Allaire was bullish about this at the time, saying that it would increase liquidity, but the decline in USDC’s market cap, combined with the growth in BUSD as well as USDT, paints a different picture.
