By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 25th, 2024
According to the first attestation report on Circle’s stablecoin, the firm’s USDC supply is fully backed by its dollar holdings.
If the previous year we observed a real euphoria around cryptocurrencies, this year we will remember as an era of stablecoins. Stablecoins are aimed to help to get over an enormous volatility of the crypto market and to give investors more confidence.
This September, a global crypto finance company Circle joined the row of firms issuing their own stablecoins. As CoinSpeaker has reported, Circle’s stablecoin called USD Coin (USDC) was developed in cooperation with the company’s CENTRE affiliate consortium and went live on September 26.
Now USDC has already successfully passed its first attestation conducted by a major auditing firm.
Attestation Report
On November 21, Circle revealed the first attestation report for its USD Coin. The report was prepared by one of the largest accounting firms in the U.S, Grant Thornton LLP. It is said that this report for the stablecoin is just the first one in a row of reports that will be prepared on a monthly basis.
The report that was signed on November 16 states that a total of $127,412,240.89 is held by Circle Internet Ltd. in a custody account for USDC. This sum is considered to be enough to cover 127,408,827 USDC that were in circulation at the time when the attestation was conducted.
“In our opinion, the Reserve Account Information in the accompanying Reserve Account Report as of October 31, 2018, at 11:59 PM UTC is correctly stated, based on the criteria set forth in the Reserve Account Report, in all material respects,” the report says.
Moreover, Grant Thornton claims that they have conducted the examination in full compliance with the attestation standards established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
It’s also worth mentioning that Grant Thornton’s examination should be considered to be an attestation rather that an audit due to its specificity.
An audit can be carried out to check a firm’s financial status together with other non-financial factors. Its main aim is to ensure that the firm conducts its operations in accordance with current laws and regulations and that there are no weak points in its performance.
An attestation is aimed to look at compiled data and to estimate whether the data is true if compared with a stated purpose or system.
As for USDC’s attestation, the received data showed that the number of coins in circulation are fully covered by the amount of money that Circle has in its reserves.
USDC: Current Situation
According to the data provided by CoinMarketCap, at the press time, there are 163 000 512 USDC tokens in circulation with a total supply of 163 471 709 USDC.
Let us also remind that last month USDC was listed by Coinbase which made it the first stablecoin supported by the exchange and the second ERC-20 token after the 0x token available for trading .