USDC launched in 2018 and positions itself as the compliance-first alternative among large stablecoins. It is issued by Circle, a US-regulated company, and its reserve reporting is more detailed and more frequent than most of its competitors‘.<\/p>\n
Circle issues USDC against dollars received and redeems it on request from verified customers, holding the reserve in cash and short-dated US Treasuries at regulated custodians. The token is native on a number of chains, and Circle also operates a bridging protocol that burns tokens on one network and mints them on another rather than locking them in a wrapper \u2014 a design that avoids the pooled-collateral risk that has repeatedly cost users money on third-party bridges.<\/p>\n
Supply is uncapped and moves with issuance and redemption. Circle publishes monthly reserve reports from an independent accounting firm, and the composition is deliberately narrow: cash at banks and short-term government debt. Narrow reserves earn less but are far easier to value in a hurry, which is the trade being made.<\/p>\n
The instructive episode is March 2023, when USDC briefly fell to around 87 cents after Circle disclosed that a portion of its reserve sat at a bank that had just failed. It recovered fully once the deposits were guaranteed, but the lesson stands: a stablecoin is only as sound as the institutions holding its reserve, and that risk is banking risk, not blockchain risk.<\/p>\n
USDC dominates in decentralised finance, where it is the most common collateral asset in lending markets and the base of many trading pairs, and it is widely used for payments and treasury operations by companies that need a regulated counterparty. Its trading volume is lower than Tether’s, but its share of on-chain collateral is disproportionately high.<\/p>\n
As with any stablecoin, holding USDC is a claim on a company rather than a bank deposit. There is no deposit insurance on the token itself, the peg depends on redemption continuing to function, and regulatory changes aimed at issuers land directly on it. It has held its peg more consistently than most, which is a record rather than a promise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
USD Coin is a dollar stablecoin issued by Circle, backed by cash and short-term Treasuries held at regulated institutions and reported monthly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"template":"","meta":{"_cp_coin_symbol":"USDC","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-650","coin","type-coin","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coin\/650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coin"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/coin"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coin\/650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}