It was first announced 4 months ago in May at the CoinDesk Consensus conference and today it has been launched successfully by Circle Internet Financial Limited. This is the first ever open source framework based stable coin to be launched meaning other companies can issue it as well (Only If they are a part of CENTRE Consortium).
This consortium also includes Bitmain Technologies Ltd. amongst its members. Bitmain recently filed for IPO with HKEX. Two such big events back to back may mean they have something bigger in hold for future. Another worthwhile thing to note is that Circle company is backed by Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs who in its glory days one of the leading multinational investment banking and the financial company was hit poorly by the Economic Recession of 2008 and had to be revived by the US government via a $10 billion bailout. But, unlike many of its other peers, Goldman Sachs has built itself up from its ashes and is standing tall again even if not in its former glory.
This USD Coin or USDC as implied by the name is another stablecoin that is pegged to the US dollar. Due to its open-source roots, this Goldman Sachs backed stablecoin has already received support from over 30 companies. Wallets BitGo, Cobo, Coinbase Wallet, & imToken are just some of the names amongst them. At present, USDC is being made available at Circle’s Poloniex exchange & Circle Trade with plans to make it available on other partner exchanges such as DigiFinex, CoinEx, KuCoin, & OKCoin as soon as feasible.
These USDC tokens are in compliance with ERC-20 standard and you can cash them to your bank accounts as well. If you want to buy these tokens, then you can do so by depositing US Dollars and then converting them into USDC tokens via Circle’s Platform. Circle’s banking partners hold in reserve equivalent US Dollars.
Also, you can convert your dollars into tokens for free but if you are redeeming USDC tokens for dollars, then you will have to pay 0.1% fees to Circle.
The CENTRE Consortium is going to be the regulator for USDC issuers, making sure that they have necessary state licenses enabling them to handle electronic money transactions, are connected with banking partners for holding the dollar reserves and most importantly fully comply by the anti-money-laundering(AML) standards.
It can also allow certified public auditors to review the partner’s USDC reserves on a monthly basis to ensure transparency. Despite being a ‘wholly owned subsidiary of Circle’ at present, there are plans in near future to turn it into a completely independent organization for more efficiency and uninterrupted regulation.
Circle is placing a lot of hopes onto its very first launched stable coin. The company hopes to eliminate the economic borders and create a much more efficient global marketplace connecting each and every person on the earth. According to Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire :
“Market infrastructure like stablecoins will become the base layer that supports every financial application. It has to be legitimate, trustworthy, built on open standards. We are solving a lot of these fundamental problems that exist. That’s a huge difference from something like Tether, and we think the market will very quickly gravitate to that.” – As reported by Bloomberg.
Needless to say, we can expect many other stable coins to be presented by CENTRE consortium in the near future which may present a competition to most popular stablecoins of today.
