USDC Multichain Expansion adds Stablecoin Access on Five More Networks

The world’s second largest stablecoin by market capitalization, USDC, has expanded to five more networks including the two leading layer-2 ecosystems.

In an announcement on Sept. 28, USDC issuer Circle stated that stablecoin was coming to five more networks: Arbitrum, Cosmos, NEAR, Optimism, and Polkadot.

The stablecoin will be launched on Arbitrum One, NEAR, Optimism, and Polkadot by the end of 2022 and Cosmos in early 2023, it added.

The announcement was made at the Converge22 conference running this week in San Francisco.

Layer-2 expansion

Joao Reginatto, vice president of product at Circle, said that “the multi-chain expansion is intended to increase USDC’s native availability from eight ecosystems to thirteen,” before adding that it “enables blockchain developers building on USDC and their users to experience greater liquidity and interoperability within the crypto economy.”

When launched, developers will be able to use Circle APIs for fiat on and off-ramps to and from USDC in their products, as well as programmable wallet infrastructure, the team tweeted.

Circle currently supports USDC natively across Algorand, Avalanche, Ethereum, Flow, Hedera, Solana, Stellar, and TRON.

Arbitrum One and Optimism are the leading two layer-2 networks with a joint market share of more than 80%. Arbitrum is the market leader with a total value locked of $2.42 billion while Optimism has $1.44 billion according to L2beat.  

NEAR Protocol is a low-cost, high throughput blockchain and Polkadot is an Ethereum rivaling smart contract and dApp ecosystem. Cosmos also provides an expanding ecosystem of decentralized applications and interconnected chains.

USDC continues to increase its stablecoin market share which now stands at about a third.

USDC supply decline

USDC supply has been on the decline over the past three months. Since the beginning of July, it has shrunk by 12.5% from 56 billion USDC to its current level of 49 billion USDC. A deepening bear market and diminished demand for DeFi have resulted in a decline in stablecoin usage.

Leading stablecoin Tether has also seen its supply shrink by 18% from a record 83 billion in mid-May to current levels of 68 billion USDT.

The total stablecoin market capitalization is $151 billion which represents 15.4% of the entire crypto market cap. Tether has a market share of 45% with 68 billion USDT while Circle has a 32.5% share. The third most popular stablecoin is Binance USD with a 14% market share.