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The Coinbase and Circle-backed CENTER consortium announced Wednesday support for its USDC stablecoin on the Solana blockchain, marking the fourth blockchain integration of the dollar-backed asset, following Ethereum, Algorand and Stellar, announced just a week ago.
Compared to Ethereum’s approximate rate of 15 transactions per second (TPS), Solana offers over 50,000 TPS, which Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire told CoinDesk helps USDC operate “on a large scale and under high-performing conditions.”
USDC was launched with the aim of creating technical and regulatory standards overseen by governments and regulators for a dollar-pegged money format and protocol, Allaire told CoinDesk. The stablecoin is “only now entering the growth phase,” he added.
USDC and USDT, the two largest stablecoins by market capitalization, expanded rapidly across new blockchains over the course of 2020 as both stablecoins aggressively pursue cross-chain growth strategies. This year, five new protocols announced support for one or both of the major stablecoins.
In early September, Tether also announced its planned integration with the “ultrafast” Solana blockchain.
Use cases for stablecoins now go beyond just trading and transferring funds, Allaire explained. Operating across multiple protocols is critical for USDC to meet the needs of new stablecoin use cases created by a thriving decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
In conjunction with its support on Solana, USDC announced a partnership with FTX; Serum, the exchange’s decentralized trading platform built on Solana; and Alameda Research, the sister company of the stock exchange.
As for whether the USDC will continue to expand to other blockchains, Allaire told CoinDSesk “absolutely”, noting that there are “many credible blockchains” that could be considered for USDC support in the future.
