USDC is Coming to Stellar!

It’s a big day for the Stellar network. We’ve just announced that Stellar is now an official chain for USDC! Combining our strengths – USDC as one of the world’s leading compliant and regulated digital dollar stablecoins and Stellar as a mature network with an unparalleled ability to connect global financial infrastructure – we are positioned to offer USDC and Stellar users a new level of opportunity.

This is a big development for Stellar and for USDC and I want to share why.

First, USDC brings a new strong, stable, and engaged USD asset to Stellar for developers and end-users to leverage when making transactions on Stellar rails. USDC also carries the advantage of having deep global liquidity across countries and platforms, which makes it an optimal asset for use in cross-border transactions. All of this brings greater competition to Stellar, especially by having multiple anchors in regions like the United States. It allows for greater growth and innovation as developers and businesses leverage these assets to create new and compelling use cases for retail and enterprise clients. This will drive us to push this network to the next level.

The addition of USDC also brings enormous value and opportunity to the Centre Consortium – a group formed by Coinbase and Circle with a vision of building a standard set of protocols for fiat-denominated digital currencies that could work across different wallets, currencies and platforms. Adding Stellar as an official chain brings an established, mature network to Centre and supports their larger strategy for a Multichain USDC Framework.

And this partnership helps build towards more diverse applications and use cases. With Stellar's unique focus on cross-border payments, transactional use cases, and our anchor model, we’re positioned to help Centre achieve their vision for fiat-backed digital currency and to help USDC further penetrate the financial stack by expanding from trading and DeFi into remittances and B2B cross-border payments. Not to mention that USDC users will benefit from Stellar’s near-instant settlement and transaction fees at fractions of a cent.

What I’m most excited about is what this means for the Stellar ecosystem. At SDF, we worked hard on this partnership because we know the value that this will bring to our ecosystem of businesses and developers. USDC 's brand and desire to collaborate with its clients to make things better and create ease of use is paramount. Stellar being part of the Centre Consortium brings exciting new opportunities for the ecosystem, especially as Centre grows and broadens its scope to other tokens based on other global currencies.

The potential scale this brings for our ecosystem is tremendous. I can’t wait for it to go live in Q1 of 2021!