By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 26th, 2024
For the 7th day in a row Coinbase is teaching us about their stable coin. They wanted to educate their clients about all the benefits of USD Coin (USDC) being the cryptocurrency at a stable price.
Coinbase decided to use 12 Days of Christmas promotion as their opportunity to promote their offerings and possibilities for their clients. The exchange launched its new 12 Days of Coinbase initiative and is publishing new features and services every day.
USDC was introduced to the crypto and trading community by the CENTRE Consortium: a joint venture co-founded by Circle and Coinbase. The main goal of the stable coin was to establish a standard for fiat on the internet and provide a governance framework and network to foster global, mainstream adoption of asset-backed stablecoins. USDC is an ERC20 token.
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.
In Coinbase they claim that for customers with a US dollar bank account, 1 USDC can always be redeemed for US$1.00, giving it a stable price. Each USDC is backed by one US dollar, which is held in a bank account. USD Coin is an Ethereum token, so you can store it in an Ethereum-compatible wallet, like Coinbase Wallet. They say they chose the Ethereum blockchain for USD Coin because of its status as the market leading smart contract platform and strong support from developers.
They said:
“USD Coin is designed to let dollars move globally from your crypto wallet to other exchanges, businesses, and people. Our mission is to build an open financial system for the world. As part of this mission, we want everyone to enjoy the stability of the world’s fiat currency, the US dollar. USD Coin allows unbanked and under-banked individuals in any country to hold a US dollar–backed asset with nothing more than a mobile phone.”
Why is It Beneficial?
Unlike regular US dollars, USD Coin doesn’t require a bank account. It doesn’t require that you live in a particular geography. And you can send USD Coin around the world at an extremely low cost in just a few minutes. This opens a lot of possibilities.
Being programmable unlocks a whole new world of applications and businesses: developers can create accounts to store money with one line of code; lending that is faster, cheaper, and more transparent; faster and cheaper payments, including payroll; global crowdfunding; transparent and stable donations to charity.
Unlike Tether, USDC operates in a much more transparent and trustworthy manner. The most practical application of a stable coin is the ability to move funds between exchanges quickly, and without having to worry about a change in value during that time.
Moving US Dollars between a cryptocurrency exchange and the bank can take several days. Moving dollars between two exchanges also is rife with complications and delays. Bitcoin is quicker but can be very volatile.
In November this year, Binance also announced that it was renaming its Tether (USDT) market to a combined Stablecoin Market (USDⓈ). The exchange explained that the move was to support more trading pairs with different stable coins as a base. The exchange went on to clarify that the new category is not a new stablecoin in itself.
“Please note that USDⓈ is not a new stablecoin: it is the symbol of Binance’s new stablecoin market.”
Since then, the exchange has added Paxos Standard Token (PAX) and TrueUSD (TUSD) to the new stablecoin market.
According to the data provided by CoinMarketCap, at the press time, there are 201,803,383 USDC tokens in circulation with a total supply of 202,961,459 USDC.
Let us also remind that in October 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.