Centre Consortium Announces Algorand as an Official Chain for USDC, Launches on Mainnet

Release Brings Major Scalability & Performance Improvements to Digital Dollar Stablecoins for Global Consumer Payment Adoption

SAN FRANCISCO and BOSTON, Sept. 9, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Centre Consortium is excited to announce that Algorand is now an official blockchain for USD Coin (USDC).  The newly released mainnet implementation of USDC for Algorand is available today, and becomes the second major blockchain after Ethererum with native support for USDC.  The Algorand blockchain brings significant innovations to the market, specifically around transaction scale and speed, helping to expand the use cases for USDC across a broad range of payments and financial applications.

As evidenced by the recent and very rapid growth and usage of stablecoins on public chains like Ethereum, there is a tremendous need for blockchain infrastructure that can scale to support significantly higher transaction throughput and lower fees on public Layer 1 blockchain infrastructure. Critically, Algorand brings over 1,000 tps and transaction fees of 1/20th of a cent to the USDC ecosystem, and soon to be released innovations from Algorand offer the potential of scaling throughput by 8-10x on Layer 1, accompanied by new secure smart contracts that complement standard tokens such as USDC.

This expanding support for USDC on new blockchains comes as USDC has rapidly grown to over 1.8 billion in circulation, experiencing more than 3x growth in the past six months, and decisively becoming the world's leading compliant and regulated digital dollar stablecoin. 

Centre was formed with the vision of creating a global standard for fiat-based internet-native digital currency, allowing money to be exchanged instantly, globally and at a low cost over the open internet, in much the same way that content, messages and data flow over the internet today. Just as the standards and formats we use for content and data (HTTP) and communications (SMTP, SMS, VOIP) work across multiple platforms, devices and operating systems, Centre aims to ensure that its stablecoin standards, formats and protocols work across multiple major blockchain platforms.