Circle Launches USDC on Polygon for Low-Cost Transactions

Circle, the issuer of stablecoins, has announced that it has begun minting USD Coin on the Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol Polygon for low cost transaction.

Users and developers have access to USDC without needing to bridge the stablecoin from Ethereum to another blockchain.

Utilizing Polygon’s scalability, Circle Mint and Circle’s developer application programming interfaces (APIs) now support Polygon-based USDC.

Circle has announced that businesses and developers will be able to construct decentralized applications using USDC on Polygon.

The offering is said to facilitate near-instant, low-fee transactions for a variety of use cases, including payments, remittances, trading, borrowing, and lending.

Before Circle announced its native Polygon USDC offering, protocol users had to rely on Ethereum’s bridged USDC (USDC.e).

The token is not issued by Circle, unlike the new offering, which can be exchanged for US dollars at a rate of 1:1. Circle supported deposits and withdrawals for USDC.e on Polygon previously for Circle Mint and its APIs.

The issuer intends to discontinue this service on November 10 and warns users attempting to transmit USDC.e to Circle Mint accounts that their assets may be irretrievable after this date.

Circle also notes that the provision of native Polygon USDC will facilitate low-cost international payments and remittances, as well as acces to trading, borrowing, and lending on prominent decentralized finance protocols, such as Aave, Compound, Curve, Uniswap, and QuickSwap.

The new Polygon USDC token address reflects a current market capitalization of some 4.3 million USDC on the scaling protocol. Source: Polygonscan

Additionally, the USDC issuer intends to introduce a cross-chain transfer protocol to Polygon to facilitate interoperability with other blockchain networks.

This will enable polygon-based USDC transfers between the Ethereum blockchain and the Bitcoin blockchain.