Circle, a global financial technology firm that provides payments and financial infrastructure for internet businesses, today announced support for USD Coin (USDC) on the Hedera network, one of the most used, sustainable, enterprise-grade public networks for the decentralized economy. With more than $30B USDC in circulation as of October 2021, USDC is the world’s fastest-growing dollar digital currency. USDC on Hedera is now available to use within the Circle Account, Circle’s global financial account for digital currency where customers can deposit, withdraw and send USDC on the Hedera network and use Hedera for USDC payment and settlement transactions. Circle’s entire suite of developer APIs have also been updated to support USDC on Hedera.
This developer support aligns with the primary focus of the HBAR Foundation, newly-formed to provide entrepreneurs with the funding and ecosystem resources needed to build and deploy new applications on the Hedera network. As the first stablecoin to launch on the Hedera network, the USDC integration ties into the Foundation’s focus on DeFi, with $2.5 billion of funding in HBAR earmarked for ecosystem grants, a significant portion of which will be dedicated to DeFi development and onboarding.
“Support for USDC on the Hedera network means more people can take advantage of dollar digital currencies,” said Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Co-founder of Circle. “With Hedera, enterprises and financial institutions can access deep liquidity across countries and platforms, making USDC on Hedera an optimal asset for cross-border transactions and trades of all kinds.”
As a 3rd generation proof-of-stake public distributed ledger, Hedera offers 10,000 transactions per second, near real-time settlement, low fees and low bandwidth consumption. The Hedera public network is governed by global institutions and designed to be completely decentralized. Launched in 2018, the Hedera network has processed over 1.6 billion transactions generated by real-world applications and has over 410k accounts. Built around a core pillar of environmental sustainability, the Hedera network has achieved carbon neutrality and is committed to carbon negative network operations.
“With the USDC launch on the Hedera network, The HBAR Foundation is taking an important step toward fulfilling its mission to ease the development and launch of DeFi applications on the network,” said Shayne Higdon, CEO and Executive Director, The HBAR Foundation. “This integration aligns well with the growing tokenized economy on the Hedera network and will help drive new projects. We look forward to working with the community to bring these applications to market.”
In addition to Hedera, Circle now supports USDC across the Ethereum, Algorand, Solana, Stellar and TRON blockchains, with more to come. This multichain support reinforces Circle’s commitment to growing the internet economy and creating network effects that will establish USDC as the standard means of value transfer across the internet.
Circle’s support for USDC on Hedera follows the announcement earlier this year by Centre Consortium—which governs USDC—that it will expand access to a range of new blockchains pioneering greater speed and scalability with less cost.
About Circle
Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of digital currencies and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is the principal operator of USD Coin (USDC), which has become the fastest growing, regulated, fully reserved dollar digital currency. USDC in circulation is greater than $30 billion and has supported over $1 trillion in on-chain transactions. Today, Circle’s transactional services, business accounts, and platform APIs are giving rise to a new generation of financial services and commerce applications that hold the promise of raising global economic prosperity for all through programmable internet commerce. Additionally, Circle operates SeedInvest, one of the largest equity crowdfunding platforms in the U.S., which is a registered broker dealer. Learn more at https://circle.com
About The HBAR Foundation
Founded in 2021, The HBAR Foundation was created to fuel development of the Hedera ecosystem by providing grants and other resources to developers, startups and organizations that seek to launch decentralized applications in DeFi, NFTs, CBDCs, ESGs, gaming and other sectors. In addition to providing funding through a streamlined grant process, The HBAR Foundation acts as an integrated force multiplier through expert support across technical, marketing, business development and other operational functions that are required to scale. For additional information, please visit https://hbarfoundation.org/ or follow the Foundation on twitter @HBAR_foundation.