Circle and Coinbase will dissolve the Centre
Date: 2023-08-22 Author: Karina Ziganova Categories: BLOCKCHAIN
Coinbase and Circle announced in a blog post on August 21 that Centre, the consortium originally responsible for the USDC stablecoin, would be disbanding.
Both companies said the Center would cease operations due to changing regulatory conditions. They said that the Center was originally intended to serve as a joint self-governing body for the USDC and explained that this is no longer necessary due to clearer regulations on stablecoins in the US and around the world.
Coinbase and Circle have stated that USDC will be managed and managed internally in the future. They said this approach would simplify operations and governance as Circle issues USDC, holds smart contract keys, and works to enforce regulations regarding reserve management and additions to new blockchains.
The change will also result in Coinbase taking a stake in Circle. The companies said the investment would allow the companies to have "greater strategic and economic alignment" and that they would maintain commercial relationships.
USDC will become more and more affordable
USDC will remain fully available. Coinbase confirmed in a statement to CryptoSlate that there will be no change to the availability of USDC on its trading platform.
Both companies also said that USDC will be available on six new blockchains in September and October 2023. It's unclear which blockchains could get their own version of USDC, though Circle said in September 2022 that it would initially support Arbitrum, Cosmos, NEAR Protocol, Optimism, and Polkadot. Not all of these additions have taken place, although Arbitrum received its own version of USDC in June 2023 and some of the above chains already have a USDC bridge.
USDC is currently the second largest stablecoin by market capitalization with a total supply of $26 billion, behind only Tether (USDT) which has a market cap of $83 billion. USDC is also the sixth largest cryptocurrency by this measure.
