Circle Rolls Out USD Digital Coin

Stablecoin

Circle announced on Wednesday (Sept. 26) that, along with the CENTRE open source consortium, it has launched a service to tokenize U.S. dollars and use them on public blockchain on the internet.

In a company blog post, Circle said individuals and institutions can enroll in the service to deposit U.S. dollars from bank accounts, convert those into tokens and redeem USDC tokens and cash them out to bank accounts. Circle also announced that USDC can be used on Circle Poloniex and Circle Trade, and with the more than 20 companies that announced or launched support for USDC on Wednesday. The blog post said that CENTRE expects to roll out more coins, and that Circle is the first of several forthcoming CENTRE members to launch USDC issuance.

“When we founded Circle five years ago, we and many in the crypto community envisioned fiat money and financial contracts executing on top of distributed public network infrastructure, building on open standards that would allow us all to share value as instantly and easily as we can access content in web browsers and exchange messages in email and messaging apps,” wrote Co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire in the blog post. “Just as HTTPS, SMTP and SIP enabled free borderless information sharing and communications, crypto assets and blockchain technology will enable us to exchange value and transact with one another in a similar way: instantly, globally, securely and at low cost.”

Circle noted that USDC is built on openness and accountability, with commercial issuers required to be licensed to handle electronic money, to have audited AML and compliance programs, to back all tokens on a fully reserved basis and to provide monthly published proof of reserves, to support fungible exchange and redemption of USDC tokens from other authorized issuer members, and to meet other reporting and review requirements established by CENTRE.

“While Circle may be the first USDC issuer, we will certainly not be the last. Leveraging $20M in funding raised last year, CENTRE is launching its broader membership framework, which includes other established financial technology firms as additional issuers,” the executives noted. “Over the coming weeks, CENTRE will share more about these other members beyond Circle.”