Key highlights:
- Circle has started supporting Polygon-based USDC with its Circle Account and Circle API products
- There’s more than 1.5 billion USDC tokens bridged from the Ethereum mainnet to Polygon
- Polygon is one of the most popular platforms for users that are looking for faster and cheaper Ethereum alternatives
Circle begins supporting USDC on Polygon
Fintech company Circle has announced support for the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin on Polygon, a Proof-of-Stake blockchain platform that’s compatible with Ethereum. According to an announcement, Circle customers can now deposit and withdraw USDC via the Polygon network through the company’s Circle Account and Circle API products.
Circle’s products now support USDC tokens that are bridged from the Ethereum mainnet over to Polygon. Even before Circle officially announced support, many users bridged their USDC from Ethereum to Polygon to use decentralized exchanges and other DeFi protocols. According to PolygonScan, there’s more than 1.5 billion USDC tokens bridged to the Polygon blockchain (the total supply of USDC is around 53.7 billion).
Circle says that the new integration will help businesses that want to access USDC on Polygon save both time and expenses:
“For businesses that want fast and efficient access to Polygon USDC, the Circle Account abstracts away the costly and time-consuming process of bridging USDC from Ethereum to Polygon manually via the Polygon Bridge. Instead, businesses can now convert fiat currency to Polygon USDC in seconds with the Circle Account, and convert back to fiat currency the same way.”
Polygon is currently one of the most popular platforms for users that are looking for a faster and cheaper alternative to Ethereum. As of May, the platform boasted more than 2.7 million monthly active wallets. According to data from DeFi Llama, DeFi protocols on Polygon have a TVL (total value locked) of about $2.2 billion. Aave is the largest DeFi protocol on Polygon in terms of TVL (just under $500 million).
USD Coin is currently the 4th largest crypto asset by market capitalization, and the 2nd largest stablecoin. On a year-to-date basis, the supply of USD Coin is up from 42.1 billion to 53.7 billion (+27.5%).
Besides Ethereum and Polygon, USDC is also available on a host of other blockchain platforms, including Solana, Avalanche, TRON and others.
