Circle plans to launch USD Coin (USDC) natively on the Ethereum (ETH) scaling solution Arbitrum (ARB) on June 8th.
The stablecoin issuer says this native USDC will be the official version of the Arbitrum ecosystem and will eventually replace the USDC currently on Arbitrum that is bridged from Ethereum.
Explains the ETH scaling solution,
“Arbitrum will be working with ecosystem apps to provide a smooth transition of liquidity from bridged USDC to native USDC over time. There will be no immediate changes to the Arbitrum Bridge, and it will continue to operate normally for bridging USDC to and from Ethereum.”
Arbitrum says the benefits of a native USD Coin include institutional on and off-ramps via Circle and upcoming support from a cross-chain transfer protocol to get rid of bridge withdrawal delays. The native USDC will also be fully reserved and always redeemable at a 1:1 ratio for US dollars, according to Circle.
With a market cap of nearly $29 billion at time of writing, USDC is the second-largest stablecoin, behind Tether USD (USDT). USDC is the fifth-largest digital asset overall.
USDC briefly lost its peg to the dollar in March following news that Circle had $3.3 billion of its $40 billion cash reserves stuck in the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The stablecoin dropped to a low of $0.877 before quickly jumping back up to the $1.00 range around three days later.
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