Circle Launches USDC Stablecoin on Hedera Hashgraph

Key takeaways:

As Enterprise-Minded Network Eyes DeFi, USDC has been included in the Hedera Hashgraph
As a part of a $2.5 billion HBAR initiative, it becomes the stablecoin’s sixth network.

The global financial technology company that provides payments and financial infrastructure to internet businesses, Circle launches USDC Stablecoin that will be supported on the Hedera network, one of the most widely used, long-lasting, enterprise-grade public networks for the decentralised economy.

The USDC stablecoin, which is used to smoothen the wheels of cryptocurrency trade, has entered the Hedera Hashgraph ecosystem.

In the DeFi market, stablecoins are quite important. Traders trade with these currencies and lend them out to make large returns on DeFi protocols.

Hashgraph is a distributed ledger system that has been termed as a “blockchain alternative.” The launch of USDC, a blockchain alternative that leverages directed acyclic graphs to time-sequence transactions without grouping them into blocks, sees USDC opening the door for a huge rise in fields like decentralised finance (DeFi).

USDC is the world’s fastest-growing dollar digital currency, with more than $30 billion in circulation as of October 2021. Customers may now deposit, withdraw, and transfer USDC on the Hedera network and use Hedera for USDC payment and settlement activities through the Circle Account, Circle’s worldwide bank account for digital currency. Hedera, as a third-generation proof-of-stake public distributed ledger, provides 10,000 transactions per second, near-real-time settlement, minimal fees, and low bandwidth use.

The whole suite of Circle developer APIs has been upgraded to enable USDC on Hedera as well. Hedera is a proof-of-stake blockchain network that was launched in 2018 and is owned and managed by a number of companies, including Google and IBM. On the network, these organisations implement “permissioned” nodes. Hedera intends to transition to a permissionless approach over time.

“We believe USDC is a key building block for DeFi and payments use cases in the crypto economy,” claimed the executive director and CEO HBAR Foundation @ShayneHigdon.

“This integration aligns well with the growing tokenized economy on the Hedera network and will help drive new projects. We look forward to working with the community to bring these applications to market.”

Third Act, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace for the theatre community; the MyHbarWallet, which focuses on payments; and Hex Trust, an institution-focused cryptocurrency custodian, are among the projects that will benefit from the inclusion of USDC, Higdon said in an interview with CoinDesk.

According to a press release, the newly created HBAR Foundation has set aside $2.5 billion in Hedera’s native currency for ecosystem funding, with a major amount going to DeFi development and onboarding.

Circle now supports USDC on the Ethereum, Algorand, Solana, Stellar, and TRON blockchains, with more to follow.

Circle’s support for USDC on Hedera comes after the Centre Consortium, which controls USDC, said earlier this year that it will extend access to a range of new blockchains pioneering better speed and scalability at a lower cost.

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