Key takeaways:
- USD Coin issuer Circle has announced that USDC will go live on five additional blockchains in the coming months
- The list of chains USDC will expand to includes Arbitrum, Cosmos, NEAR, Optimism, and Polkadot
- The news comes amid a decreasing USDC circulating supply – the USDC market cap has decreased by more than 10% since March
Circle announces the biggest USDC expansion to date, plans support for 13 different blockchains in total
Circle, the company behind USD Coin, the second largest market cap stablecoin in the industry, has announced a massive expansion is in the works in the coming months. According to the company’s official statement, USDC will go live on Arbitrum, NEAR, Optimism, and Polkadot by the end of this year. In addition, support for the interoperability-focused Cosmos chain is planned for early next year.
Circle’s Vice President of Product, Joao Reginatto, had the following to say about the major expansion:
“The multi-chain expansion is intended to increase USDC’s native availability from eight ecosystems to thirteen, and enables blockchain developers building on USDC and their users to experience greater liquidity and interoperability within the crypto economy.”
Reginatto added that making USDC available on additional chains will allow developers, institutions, and exchanges to innovate and have access to liquidity provided by the “trusted and stable digital dollar”.
USDC’s latest expansion came in June, when it was unveiled that Circle Account and Circle APIs had been made available on Polygon, a popular layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum.
As of this writing, USDC is natively supported across Algorand, Avalanche, Ethereum, Flow, Hedera, Solana, Stellar, and TRON.
USDC supply decreased by over -10% amid the bear market
The circulating supply of USDC has decreased from its peak of $47.3 billion in March 2022 to $41.8 billion today, roughly a -10.5% drop. The decrease reflects the broader market trend that saw most crypto assets lose more than -60% since the start of this year due to a combination of macroeconomic factors, including rising inflation and interest rates, the energy crisis, and a series of geopolitical uncertainties.
Similar to USDC, the largest stablecoin Tether, has also seen a considerable circulating supply decrease in the past couple of months. According to data curated by The Block, USDT hit a market valuation of roughly $83 billion in April. It has lost more than $15 billion since then.
