Circle Starts USDC Minting On Polygon PoS, Skips Ethereum Bridges

After contending with the SEC that stablecoins shouldn't fall under the same regulations as traditional securities, Circle has chosen to take the initiative. USDC can now be accessed directly on Polygon PoS without the need for bridges.

What Happened: Stablecoin issuer, Circle announced that it has commenced minting USD Coin USDC/USD natively on the Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol Polygon facilitating the availability of USDC to users and developers without bridging the stablecoin from Ethereum to another blockchain. Businesses and developers will also be able to build decentralized applications with USDC on Polygon. Polygon proof-of-stake (PoS) USDC will have complete support from Circle Mint and Circle APIs.

Also Read: Circle Argues Stablecoins Are Not Securities, Files Friend of Court Brief In Binance-SEC Case

The new offering will enable almost instant, low-fee transactions for various use cases, including payments, remittances, trading, borrowing, and lending on decentralized finance protocols, including Aave, Compound, Curve, Uniswap, and QuickSwap.

As of October 2023, the Polygon PoS ecosystem includes more than 475 dApps and over 300,000 active wallet addresses.

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Why It Matters: Prior to the announcement, protocol users had to use bridged USDC (USDC.e) from the Ethereum blockchain. The token is not issued by Circle and is redeemable at a 1:1 ratio for USD. Earlier, Circle supported deposits and withdrawals for USDC.e on Polygon for Circle Mint and its APIs.

This service will be discontinued from Nov.10 and users are warned that an attempt to send USDC.e to Circle Mint accounts after this date will make the assets unrecoverable. 

Circle also plans to introduce a cross-chain transfer protocol to Polygon to enable interoperability with other blockchain networks. This will open Polygon-based USDC transfers to and from the Ethereum blockchain.

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Read Next: Cosmos Opens Doors To Circle's Native USDC Through CCTP

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