Since launching USD Coin (USDC) on Ethereum in September 2018, we have collaborated closely with the ecosystem and witnessed invaluable innovation. As Ethereum approaches “The Merge” event, we are excited about the future scaling opportunities it unlocks as well as the reduced energy consumption profile of the network. USDC is the largest dollar-backed stablecoin issued on Ethereum and, as the issuer of USDC, Circle intends to fully and solely support the Ethereum proof-of-stake (PoS) chain post-merge.
USDC is not only currently the largest dollar-backed stablecoin issued on Ethereum, but actually the largest ERC-20 asset overall, with over $45B in market capitalization (as of August 9, 2022) residing in that 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 understand the responsibility we have for the Ethereum ecosystem and businesses, developers and end users that depend on USDC, and we intend to do the right thing.
We are excited about the upcoming merge between Ethereum’s current execution layer and the Beacon Chain, with its new PoS consensus. As a result of our decision to support the Ethereum PoS chain post-merge, we do not anticipate disruptions to USDC on-chain capabilities nor to our fully automated issuance and redemption services. (UPDATE: Please see our recent blog post regarding Circle maintenance during the Ethereum merge event.) Circle’s testing environment is connected to the Goerli Ethereum testnet, and we will monitor closely as it merges with Prater in the coming days. While we don’t speculate on the possibility of forks post Ethereum Mainnet merge, USDC as an Ethereum asset can only exist as a single valid “version,” and as stated previously, our sole plan is to fully support the upgraded Ethereum PoS chain.
We look forward to the continued progress of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap. We see the planned upgrades as key to the growth and improvement of the infrastructure capabilities. If you are a development team building on top of USDC on Ethereum and have questions about how this impacts you, please check Tim Beiko’s blog post on the impact of the merge to Ethereum’s application layer, or reach out to our support team via customer-support@circle.com.
