Circle Launches USDC On Algorand

The company behind the USD Coin comes with an official statement of collaboration with the Algorand Foundation to provide fiat-backed stablecoin potential to Algorand’s blockchain.

On 24 June, the Senior Vice President of GCC at Circle, Josh Hawkins, made a public announcement of the agreement between the two companies, saying that the newly-formed partnership will enable customers to easily move funds between card networks and traditional banks to digital dollars on the Algorand blockchain.

He also mentioned some of the advantages of this collaboration, including the opportunity for users to have custody and manage accounts and payments activity through Circle APIs, while simultaneously gaining the speed, security and throughput advantages of Algorand’s blockchain.

According to Circle, USDC is not only the fastest-growing stablecoin, supported by hundreds of companies worldwide, but also one of the few cryptocurrencies to see an exponential growth of over 100% in circulation since the start of the pandemic. More than $2.5 billion USDC have been issued to this day, with over $50 billion in transaction volume. With the increasing global demand for digital dollars, USDC has more than $940 million in circulation.

“As more financial institutions and enterprises look to build decentralized financial applications, they need a well-suited infrastructure and a compliant, regulated, and widely accepted stablecoin,” said the COO of Algorand Foundation Fangfang Chen in the official press release. She also expressed Algorand’s excitement about partnering with Circle and providing financial institutions with the tools needed for leveraging the unique benefits of USDC and offering enterprise-grade solutions to build real-world use cases.

Algorand becomes the second organization to establish support for USDC. Meanwhile, CENTRE, the company behind the USDC stablecoin technology, announced multi-chain framework support for the asset that will provide the opportunity for blockchains other than Ethereum to integrate it into their systems.

In their official statement, CENTRE points out to Algorand as the first blockchain of many to integrate USDC because the project is specifically developed for high-volume financial applications. Circle will use a token bridge that authorizes USDC to be swapped with ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. This will allow for multi-chain transfers for supporting use cases, developers, and ecosystems. All the stablecoins on the Algorand protocol will be backed by fiat reserves.

The collaboration between Algorand and Circle will surely attract other blockchain projects to the newly-created Multi-Chain system. Circle has announced that in the third tax quarter of 2020, they will provide a simpler and more seamless API for transferring payments between USDC on Ethereum and USDC on Algorand, further stimulating the involvement of other blockchain companies into CENTRE’s Multi-Chain framework.