At 6:43 am UTC on Thursday, September 15, 2022, Ethereum completed The Merge, the platform’s much-anticipated transition to a more energy-efficient infrastructure.
For a few hours before and for a few hours after, Circle’s minting, redeeming, and sending of USD Coin (USDC) and Euro Coin (EUROC) were paused on Ethereum. As expected, The Merge was smooth sailing and we now fully and solely support USDC and EUROC on the upgraded PoS chain. It is important, however, to remain vigilant about bad actors' scams & phishing attempts that encourage you to interact with unsupported assets on the ETH PoW chain.
To ensure you are transacting with the genuine USDC on Ethereum, we advise the reference to the USDC smart contract available on Etherscan.
Leading up to The Merge, we said our goal was to make the transition as frictionless, secure and safe as possible for our customers.
So how seamless was The Merge? Here are some key points (provided by Circle’s internal data) that help answer this question, at least from the perspective of Circle’s business:
- $671M USDC was minted in the 24 hours in 556 transactions after The Merge without incident
- $1.1B USDC was redeemed in the 24 hours in 1089 transactions after The Merge without incident
- Circle’s minting, burning, and sending USDC was unavailable for over five hours – the most these services have ever not been available on Ethereum since USDC was launched in 2018
The Merge is a milestone for Ethereum, the industry, and frankly the world. It serves as an impressive demonstration of the robustness and resilience of blockchain technology.
USDC is not only currently the largest dollar-backed stablecoin issued on Ethereum, but actually the largest ERC-20 asset overall, with over $42B in market capitalization (as of September 20, 2022) residing in the Ethereum ecosystem. USDC has become a core building block for Ethereum DeFi innovation. It has facilitated the adoption of L2 solutions and helped broaden the set of use cases that today rely on Ethereum’s vast suite of capabilities.
We look forward to all the innovations to be built atop Ethereum and the reduced energy consumption profile of the network in the future. We celebrate the team that worked on making The Merge a success.
