Key highlights:
- USD Coin (USDC) has been deployed on the Avalanche blockchain
- Previously, users had to bridge USDC tokens from other blockchain over to Avalanche
- The amount of USDC tokens in circulation has increased almost tenfold this year
USD Coin is now natively supported on the Avalanche blockchain
The popular USD Coin stablecoin has been deployed on the Avalanche blockchain, bringing the total number of platforms supported by USD Coin to 7. According to an announcement by USD Coin issuer Circle, it’s now also offering USDC liquidity on its Circle Account and Circle API products.
Avalanche is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain platform that offers considerable scalability while still being compatible with the Solidity smart contracts programming language. The platform’s low transaction costs have attracted plenty of DeFi users, and the Avalanche DeFi ecosystem had a TVL (Total Value Locked) of over $10 billion as of November.
The Avalanche blockchain already supports USDT, which is the most popular stablecoin in the cryptocurrency market. However, there’s still a lot of demand for USD Coin in DeFi circles, so the addition of the stablecoin to Avalanche should provide a boost for the platform’s DeFi ecosystem. Even before USD Coin natively supported the Avalanche blockchain, users bridged USDC tokens from other blockchains to Avalanche. Here’s what Ava Labs president John Wu had to say in an interview with CoinDesk:
“On Avalanche, the use of USDC is higher than that of USDT. Although USDT’s market cap is bigger, USDC is probably the one that a lot of U.S.-based people trust more.”
To get some context on the quick growth of USD Coin, we should highlight that USDC started 2021 with a supply of around 4.2 billion tokens. This figure has grown almost tenfold during the year, and there’s now around 41.7 billion USDC tokens in circulation.
The news seems to have been welcomed by the market, as Avalanche’s native asset AVAX is now on the verge of entering the cryptocurrency top 10 after gaining about 9.4% in the last 24 hours. Currently, the 11th-ranked AVAX has a market capitalization of $21.6 billion, while the 10th-ranked DOT is sitting at $22.6 billion. Today’s AVAX rally is especially notable because the cryptocurrency market as a whole has been quiet, with the total market cap slipping by 0.1% on the day.
