The USD Coin has a variety of applications. It is quite encouraging to see Visa’s recent announcement that it will settle transactions in USDC on the Ethereum blockchain.
To hedge against cryptocurrency market volatility without leaving the crypto ecosystem is now the most popular use case for USDC. Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications can work with stablecoins, and they can also generate interest. Unlike currency, USDC may be used on decentralised exchanges (dApps) like Uniswap, yearn.finance, and SushiSwap because it runs on the Ethereum network.
Through these dApps, investors can obtain loans, pay interest on those loans, and even resolve insurance claims on the blockchain. Since USDC is anchored to the dollar, this reduces the risk involved with investing in volatile cryptocurrencies and enables risk-tolerant investors to stake USDC for interest rates above 10%.
Brief History of USD Coin
Centre Consortium, a partnership between Coinbase and Circle with the goal of expanding the use of fiat stablecoins, developed USDC. When a user purchases USDC from an exchange like Coinbase using US dollars, new coins are created in the USDC system. In order to guarantee that a unit of USDC can always be exchanged for a unit of USDC, Centre Consortium then places this money in its reserve.
The market value of USDC, which was founded in 2018, increased from about $200 million to more than $14 billion. The number of USDC has dramatically increased, despite the price of USDC not varying by more than a percentage point in any direction.
The US-based USD Coin has undergone a full third-party audit. Contrary to Tether (USDT), there is no doubt that each and every token in USDC is backed by $1 in reserves as collateral. It should be emphasised that this collateral need not be in the form of US Dollars; regulators have accepted various forms of debt as collateral. Given the growing doubts around Tether’s USDT backing, USDC might be a more reliable option.
