Circle to launch USDC natively on Arbitrum

Circle said on June 1 that it will soon launch a native version of its USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin on the Arbitrum blockchain.

The new version of USDC will be “native to Arbitrum” and added that this asset will be considered Arbitrum’s official version of USDC, according to Circle.

The new token will launch on June 8, Circle said.

New native USDC

The company noted that all USDC on Arbitrum is currently bridged from Ethereum. The older Ethereum-bridged version will be marked USDC.e on Arbitrum block explorers and will gradually be replaced by the new native version of USDC.

The new native token will provide benefits around redeemability, on/off-ramps, and future upgrades. Circle said that it plans to bring its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol to Arbitrum, which will allow for faster transfers between Arbitrum and Ethereum.

The announcement also said that Arbitrum would work with apps in its ecosystem to ensure a straightforward transition of liquidity. It said that there will be “no immediate change to the Arbitrum bridge” and that bridged USDC will continue to work as usual.

USDC is on eight blockchains

USDC is currently available on Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, TRON, Algorand, Stellar, Flow, and Hedera. The vast majority of USDC appears to be on Ethereum, which holds $27 billion of the stablecoin’s $29 billion market cap, based on block explorer data.

Though Arbitrum serves as a layer 2 network and could benefit from Ethereum’s success, Arbitrum contains relatively little Ethereum-bridged USDC at present.

Approximately $1.1 billion of bridged USDC is currently on Arbitrum.

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