At the beginning of July, Circle announced the support for TRON USDC, one of the largest open blockchains networks in the world. TRON empowers a wide crypto ecosystem popular within Asian markets and beyond.
Circle’s move enables the TRON community to leverage one of the fastest-growing and safest dollar digital currencies. USDC (TRC-20) can already be used within Circle Account – a global business account for cryptocurrency. Circle users can now convert, mint, and redeem USDC on TRON, as well as use the Tron token (TRX) for payment and settlement transactions.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Co-founder of Circle, commented:
“TRON has built a very large and highly successful blockchain platform and network, and is one of the most widely used in stablecoin transactions. We're excited to bring the benefits of a trusted dollar digital currency such as USDC to this growing ecosystem of users and developers.”
Today, USD Coin (USDC) is available on five blockchains: Ethereum, Algorand, Solana, Stellar, and Tron. Meanwhile, Centre Consortium, the governance organization behind USDC, said that the stablecoin would be available on several other blockchain networks in the coming months. Eventually, USDC has the potential to become the standard USD stablecoin across the internet economy.
TRON founder Justin Sun expressed his delight to have support for USDC on TRON.
“There's unending demand for the world's fastest-growing stablecoin,” he said. “I cannot wait to see what end users are able to do with USDC.”
What is TRON?
TRON is an advanced public blockchain network that supports smart contracts and has ultra-fast transaction speed, low fees, and scalable infrastructure. The TRON ecosystem has been growing rapidly, which is reflected by the native token’s market cap of $4.7 billion as of August 4, 2021, putting TRON among the top 30 largest cryptocurrencies. The network has handled over 2 billion transactions and hosts hundreds of thousands of smart contracts.
The TRON blockchain routes the exchange of account data via three layers:
- Core Layer – it computes instructions coded through Solidity (also used by Ethereum) or Java. The instructions are then sent to the Tron Virtual Machine (TVM), which eventually executes the logic.
- Application Layer – developers use this layer to build wallets and apps powered by TRX.
- Storage Layer – this layer is meant to segment blockchain data and its state data.
TRON relies on a consensus mechanism called Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). According to the algorithm’s consensus rules, a rotating group of 27 “super representatives,” who are TXR holders that stake their tokens, are entrusted to become the next block validators and maintain the blockchain history. The super representatives are selected every six hours and are rewarded with newly minted TRX for their effort.
TRON adds new blocks to the network every three seconds, which makes it one of the most scalable networks in the market today.
Besides super representatives, users can operate three types of nodes on the network:
- Witness nodes, which vote on protocol decisions and propose blocks;
- Full nodes, which display transactions and blocks;
- Solidity nodes, which synchronize irrevocable blocks from full nodes and provide APIs.
TRON was developed and launched by Sun Yuchen, better known as Justin Sun, who received Forbes’ “30-Under-30” award in Asia in 2017.
Why TRON?
TRON was chosen as the next blockchain for the Circle multichain framework because it is a scalable blockchain with high throughput, capable of handling up to 2,000 transactions per second (tps). For comparison, Ethereum can process about 15 tps, which can lead to congestion on the network and high transaction fees.
TRON is also currently most popular in Asian markets, and Circle hopes that USDC reaches all corners of the world thanks to multichain infrastructure for USDC.
USDC launched on TRON in June, and has already seen significant activity, with more than $100 million USDC being minted on the network by June 30, 2021.
The TRON ecosystem continues to grow, with more than 800,000 smart contracts built on the network and more than 42.5 million accounts. Learn more about Multichain USDC here.
