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Circle publishes USDC stablecoin attestation to increase transparency

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USDC stablecoin has managed to garner significant traction over the past few months. Since the beginning of the year, the dollar-pegged stablecoin had grown more than 2,600%. in terms of circulation. In the latest development, Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of the team behind the digital token, Circle has published a new post wherein he elucidated that the stablecoin is backed by trust, transparency, and accountability.

Allaire claimed in his blog post that Circle and the Centre Consortium has guaranteed the “pillars of trust” to ensure that the community recognises that USDC remains backed on a 1:1 basis with dollar-denominated assets. The exec also underscored that the “pillars of trust” includes ensuring that the USDC ecosystem remained under the governance of the highest level of regulatory and prudential standards.

While stating that the commitment to openness, competition, and responsible financial services innovation remains a foundation for both the Centre Consortium and Circle, Allaire went on to add,

“Providing assurances demonstrated by reserve attestations issued by Grant Thornton, one of the world’s leading accounting firms, that dollar-denominated assets can meet circulation for USDC outstanding. Core economic activities underpinning USDC are built inside the perimeter of the U.S. financial system, and not outside of it.”

Circle’s future plans for USDC

Allaire revealed pondering over different mechanisms to share this in an on-chain, Oracle-linked format while developing and publishing comprehensive analytics on the core liquidity profile of USD Coin, such as the history of creation and redemption behaviour associated with market conditions.

As the stabkecoin issuer moves ahead with its ambitious plans with the upcoming transition to a public company, Circle aims to enhance opportunities for greater transparency, accountability and disclosure around its wider business and functions. Collectively, Allaire asserted that this expanding public accountability can, in fact, aid in enhancing trust in Circle, the USDC stablecoin and ventures building on the standards and market infrastructure that the team has been generating over the past several years.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire Expresses Concern Over STABLE Act, Requests Shackles to be Removed

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The digital assets market has seen several ups and downs over the years with regulations playing a key role in deciding its fate. The past couple of years saw a resurgence of positive sentiments within the industry but that seems to have been reversed by the latest STABLE Act bill.

A breakdown of the bill cited that upcoming issuers of stablecoins need the approvals of relevant banking bodies, the FED and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC]. This act was seen as a violation of major cryptocurrency principles with Circle chief Executive Jeremy Allaire making his disagreement public on Twitter.

Allaire was not the only major player in the industry to voice his concern as he joined several other bigwigs to call out the hypocrisy on the part of the United States Congress. He believed that the Stablecoin Act would represent a huge step back for digital innovation in the United States. Many crypto supporters have always pointed out that regulations in the US were a major reason for the stifling of developments.

The Circle CEO targetted the decision for its impact on several major developments made over the years. Instead of affecting what we have built, Congress should focus on elevating these standards so that everyone can use it, said Allaire. He also expressed his concern in his latest Twitter thread which read:

” Any act of Congress in this sphere should be focused on embracing, investing in and supporting the incredible pace of open innovation that is happening with stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure. An enormous amount of the innovation brought to the underbanked and small businesses has been driven by non-bank fintech companies (Stripe, Square, PayPal, Circle, Coinbase, Apple, Google and many many others).”

Several cryptocurrency enthusiasts chimed in by saying that the role of the Fed should be to point out irregularities and not to put a stop to innovation. Allaire built on this argument and gave his two cents on what the governmental body can do in the coming months. In his words, the US government should look at how they can raise the bar for technical and governance standards for stablecoins in the mainland.

Despite the backlash from the cryptocurrency community, the bill introduced by Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib was praised by her peers. She was also joined by the Congressmen Jesus Garcia and Stephen Lynch for the initial draft and introduction. It is yet to be seen if the Act would be converted into a bill, an event dreaded by the cryptocurrency community.

USDC Stablecoin Gets A Boost; Circle To Start High Yield Digital Dollar Business Accounts

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The volatile nature of the crypto industry prevented several individuals from stepping into the market. However, stablecoins were rolled out as a boon to these individuals as these coins are pegged to a fiat currency and do not entail the wrath of being highly volatile. Taking stablecoins up a notch, prominent crypto platform, Circle has revealed its latest feature that involves the stablecoin USDC.

Businesses Accounts To Be Built On The Second-Largest Stablecoin

USDC was the brainchild of Circle and its collaboration with San Francisco’s crypto exchange Coinbase. Today, USDC persists as the second-largest stablecoin with a market cap of $2.863 billion. The USDC stablecoin did unravel well and Circle has decided to capitalize on the stablecoin.

In a recent blog post, Circle announced that it would soon roll out business accounts for both short as well as medium-term high yield interest rates. These accounts would further be formulated entirely on USDC. Users would, however, be required to join a waitlist to garner a digital dollar business account. The APY on these accounts starts from 8.5% and would go up to 10.75% for a 12-month fixed term. The fixed-term again ranges from one month to 12 months.

Circle’s latest move would aid platforms longing for higher maturities, businesses as well as fintech. Elaborating on the yet to be launched platform, Circle’s blog post read,

“While stablecoins such as USDC have become bedrocks for how fiat currency moves in the support of crypto asset markets, it’s also grown dramatically as a liquid digital dollar used in rapidly growing internet-based borrowing and lending markets.”

This high yield program is in association with Genesis Global Capital. Circle revealed that through this partnership, the platform intends to offer a streamlined program to stimulate internet businesses as well as fintech.

The USD coin has come a long way and is seen making its way to the top of the crypto ladder. While USDT still remains the largest stablecoin with a market cap of $17 billion, the latest news from Circle could accelerate the market cap of USDC.

USDC Stablecoin

 

Algorand Becomes Official Chain For USDC After Stablecoin’s Launch On Mainnet

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Goldman Sachs-backed global fintech firm Circle announced the launch of its stablecoin USDC on Algorand’s mainnet. In collaboration with the Centre Consortium, the platform announced that Algorand is now an official blockchain for USDC.

Following this development, Algorand becomes the second major blockchain to have the two most popular stablecoins- Tether [USDT] and Circle’s USD-pegged stablecoin USD Coin [USDC] after Ethereum.

According to the official blog post, the Algorand implementation of USDC will allow on-chain transactions that provide nearly instant settlement finality [5 seconds], with a transaction throughput approaching 1000 tps and current average transaction fees of nearly 1/20th of a cent [USD]. Using public APIs, developers can also swap USDC across Ethereum and Algorand.

Commenting on the new launch, cryptography pioneer and Turing award winner Silvio Micali, Founder of Algorand, Inc stated,

“This is a defining milestone for frictionless mainstream payments as well as sophisticated financial applications. This launch brings together the convenience of USDC and an advanced protocol for global financial exchange in which Layer-1 smart contracts are as simple and secure as ordinary payments.”

Previously in June this year, Circle had partnered with the not-for-profit organization, Algorand Foundation to bring fiat-backed stablecoin capability to the Algorand blockchain, as part of the broader effort from Centre Consortium for the development of Multichain USDC.

skew main usdbacked stable coin contenders market cap usd

Besides, over the past year, USDC has grown significantly making it one of the largest stablecoins in the world. Its market cap stood at $1.83 at the time of writing. Having the two most popular stablecoins is likely to attract more high-value stablecoins on Algorand. Additionally, this launch also opens doors for the foundation to get a boost from Circle’s extensive list of investors with industry giants, such as Bitmain, and Goldman Sachs.

While stating that the launch represents a significant improvement to the stablecoin’s scalability, improving its utility and making it a significantly more useful protocol for solving real-world financial problems, Alesia Haas, Chief Financial Officer at Coinbase also added,

“Expanding USDC from Ethereum to additional blockchains like Algorand will ensure USDC has the flexibility to support everything from emerging DeFi projects to large-scale financial institutions.”

Ethereum based Address holding $100,000 blacklisted by CENTRE

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For the first time in the digital asset industry, a crypto address was blacklisted on the basis of a law enforcement request. According to the reports, CENTRE, an organization that issues USDC stablecoin at the top of the Ethereum blockchain, blacklisted an address worth USDC $100,000.

The request for a law enforcement application has yet to be disclosed, but CENTRE, an organization launched under Circle-Coinbase, has issued a statement. It’s said,

“Centre can confirm it blacklisted an address in response to a request from law enforcement. While we cannot comment on the specifics of law enforcement requests, Centre complies with binding court orders that have appropriate jurisdiction over the organization.”

Josh Hawkins, Circle Spokesperson, speaking on behalf of the incident, said that the blacklisting had taken place back in mid-June, but the representative failed to give any further input on the incident.

According to Etherscan.io, on 16 June a blacklist function was called to that particular “blacklist” address by 0x5dB0115f3B72d19cEa34dD697cf412Ff86dc7E1b, which was an entity owned by the parent organization, that is CENTRE.

According to a policy document shared by the media outlet, it has been stated that a blacklisted address will no longer function as a free address for receiving and transacting USDC and that the crypto assets under the address can not be transferred on-chain. The document referred to,

“To ensure effective Centre oversight of this Policy, Centre will regularly report publicly, the most up-to-date list of blacklisted addresses, amount of USDC tokens frozen, and corresponding fiat reserves that have been segregated. In addition, this information will be verified and publicly reported by the monthly attestation of the Centre’s outside accounting firm.”

The above incident has now brought into question the decentralization standards adhered to by CENTRE and USDC if the organization is easily able to blacklist an address without user consent, and Circle ‘s website has also indicated that blacklisted addresses could possibly be “totally and permanently unrecoverable.”

Such censorship was the result of a short reaction from the user of Reddi,

“Central government control and censorship are just going to get worse.”