Centre Consortium announces Algorand as an official chain for USDC

By Pavithra R

The Centre Consortium for the development of Multichain USDC has announced that Algorand as an official blockchain for USD Coin (USDC).

The expanding support for USDC on new blockchains comes in the wake of the rapid growth USDC is experiencing, with over 1.8 bn in circulation, more than 3x growth in the past 6months, and decisively becoming the world’s leading compliant and regulated digital dollar stablecoin.

“This is a defining milestone for frictionless mainstream payments as well as sophisticated financial applications. This launch brings together the convenience of USDC and an advanced protocol for global financial exchange in which Layer-1 smart contracts are as simple and secure as ordinary payments,” said Silvio Micali, Founder of Algorand, Inc.

USDC for Algorand is available on the Algorand Mainnet. As part of the launch, developers can instantly swap USDC across Ethereum and Algorand using public APIs that enable cross-chain transfers.

“Expanding USDC from Ethereum to additional blockchains like Algorand will ensure USDC has the flexibility to support everything from emerging DeFi projects to large-scale financial institutions. Today’s launch represents a significant improvement to USDC’s scalability, improving its utility and making it a significantly more useful protocol for solving real-world financial problems. We look forward to supporting USDC on Algorand for both our retail and institutional customers in the future,” said Alesia Haas, Chief Financial Officer at Coinbase.

The newly released mainnet implementation of USDC for Algorand is available and becomes the second major blockchain after Ethererum with native support for USDC. With increased growth and usage of stable coins on public chains like Ethereum, there is a copious need for blockchain infrastructure that can scale to support higher transaction throughput and lower fees on public Layer 1 blockchain infrastructure. The Algorand implementation of USDC enables on-chain transactions that provide nearly instant settlement finality (5 seconds), transaction throughput approaching 1000 tps, and current average transaction fees of approximately 1/20th of a cent (USD).

“Algorand has been at the forefront of innovation in scalable, secure blockchain infrastructure, and with the next major phase of growth with USDC demanding web-scale infrastructure for global consumer payments applications, we are excited to support the launch of USDC on Algorand. Algorand’s focus on providing capabilities that are geared towards regulated financial institutions is also important as digital dollar stablecoins such as USDC become a core market infrastructure in the financial services industry more broadly,” said Jeremy Allaire, Chairman, and CEO of Circle.

Earlier, Algorand Foundation partnered with Circle to bring USD Coin to Algorand.

The Centre Consortium, an organization co-founded by Circle and Coinbase, was formed with the vision of creating a global standard for fiat-based internet-native digital currency, allowing money to be exchanged instantly, globally and at a low cost. Centre has also been encouraged by the growing interest in using USDC within regulated financial institution settings, including leading FinTechs and payments companies, global banking, and securities firms.