December 23, 2024
Circle rolls out native USDC tokens on Polygon

Stablecoin issuer Circle has declare It has started minting USD Coin (USDC) natively on Ethereum layer 2 scaling protocol Polygon.

Users and developers can deposit and withdraw USDC without the need to bridge the stablecoin from Ethereum to another blockchain. Circle Mint and Circle’s developer application programming interfaces (APIs) now support Polygon-based USDC, taking advantage of Polygon’s extensions.

According to Circle’s announcement, businesses and developers will be able to build decentralized applications using USDC on Polygon. The new product is said to provide near-instant, low-fee transactions for a variety of use cases, including payments, remittances, trading, and lending.

Until Circle announces its native Polygon USDC offering, users of the protocol must use the bridged USDC (USDC.e) on the Ethereum blockchain. This token is not issued by Circle, and unlike newly issued tokens, the newly issued tokens are redeemable for U.S. dollars at a 1:1 ratio.

Related: Circle Launches USDC Stablecoin on Polkadot Asset Center

Circle has previously provided support for Circle Mint and its API on Polygon for USDC.e deposits and withdrawals. The issuer plans to discontinue the service as of November 10, warning users who attempt to send USDC.e to Circle Mint accounts that their assets may not be recovered after this date.

The new Polygon USDC token address reflects the current market value of the expansion protocol, which is approximately 4.3 million USDC. Source: Polygonscan

Circle also pointed out that providing native Polygon USDC will enable low-cost global payments and remittances, as well as transactions and lending based on leading decentralized financial protocols (including Aave, Compound, Curve, Uniswap and QuickSwap).

The USDC issuer also plans to launch a cross-chain transfer protocol to Polygon to achieve interoperability with other blockchain networks. This will unlock transfers between Polygon-based USDC and the Ethereum blockchain.

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