Circle-Backed USD Coin Officially Broke $1 Billion Market Cap

Circle-backed USD Coin founded by Coinbase, officially hit a new milestone in market capitalization of $1 billion, as we are reading in the following altcoin news today.

Officially today, on June 3, 2020, the USDC market cap broke the $1 billion thresholds for the first time since it was launched back in October in2018. According to the data from Coin360, the stablecoin had steady, sharp growth since March 2020. The second-largest USD pegged stablecoin after USDT, ranked 17^th as the largest cryptocurrency by market cap as of press time.

The news was announced today by the Centre Consortium, an organization co-founded by Coinbase and Circle which only highlighted a lot of factors that contributed to the notable growth of the stablecoin. According to the Centre, the demand for the coin in 2019 was mainly driven by the progress of the DeFi space or decentralized finance. Centre identifies three major developments that pushed the sharp growth of USDC including the increased demand for low-cost transfers among businesses across the world, the huge impact of the Compound protocol which is also a huge DeFi project, and the coronavirus-spiked financial crisis. Centre added that it anticipates more growth in 2020:

 “We expect USDC to continue growing rapidly throughout 2020 and help fulfill Centre Consortium’s mission of establishing an open standard for money on the internet.”

The Circle-backed USD Coin progress comes in line with the overall growth on the market. Tether, the biggest USD pegged stablecoin, crossed a $10 billion market capitalization on July 1 which is a 144% growth recorded from the start of this year. the news came shortly after Tether overtook XRP as the second-biggest altcoin and became the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap in March. On June 24, the Centre announced a multi-chain USDC framework, featuring the Algorand blockchain as the first network that powers USDC on another blockchain.

$USDC market cap exceeds $1B https://t.co/nshSxFMPi0

— CENTRE (@centre_io) July 2, 2020

As per the recent news, The MakerDAO governance has officially approved the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin as the third collateral type that is accepted in the Maker Protocol, as a community post published on March 17 showed. As we can see, MakerDAO authorizes the USDC stablecoin after an extraordinary executive vote outside of the usual weekly schedule occurred. The move also follows the extensive discussion in the Maker community on the merits of adding USDC and the appropriate risk parameters for the token.