Circle’s USDC Stablecoin Coming to Coinbase’s Base Next Week

After two years of split governance, the cooperation between the two companies has culminated in a new agreement, with Coinbase even acquiring a minority stake in Circle.

Earlier this summer, Circle shared plans to upgrade USDC’s technical capabilities in order to pave the way for present and future projects – and the release of the next upgrade has just been announced.

Stable September

On the 29th of August, Jeremy Allaire – the CEO of Circle – announced that USDC would be made available on the Base network sometime next week.

Native $USDC on @BuildOnBase. Coming next week. #StableSeptember. Let’s go! https://t.co/oqfI0ZZhCn

— Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) August 29, 2023

Although USDC could already be used on the Base network by using USDbC – a USDC token backed by liquidity on the Ethereum network – USDC will now become native on the Base network.

By eliminating the bridge, Circle aims to clear up any doubts regarding the reserves backing the bridged USDC tokens and to make it easier for institutional investors to manage their holdings across both networks.

“USDC issued by Circle will be native to Base and can be considered the official form of USDC for the ecosystem. Over time, we expect native USDC liquidity will grow and may replace the currently circulating bridged USDbC liquidity that comes from Ethereum.”

Eventually, USDbC will probably be deprecated, although such a decision would probably be taken far off into the future.

For the time being, the Base Bridge will function as it has up until now.

“There will be no immediate changes to Base Bridge and it will continue to operate normally.”

Transition Overseen By Base

Once the Base-native version of USDC is launched, more information for developers on how to transition to the new network will be provided by the BuildOnBase X account, according to a press release published by Circle.

The Base team will continue to work closely with dApp developers who wish to fully transition to the Base network.

So far, Base has seen incredible growth, gaining upwards of 100k users in a day and a million in under two weeks.

In order to further grow its reach, Base has also signed a superchain agreement with Optimism. Together, the two companies will split both the revenue and the governance of the Optimism collective.