USDC

USDC is a stablecoin designed to hold a value of one US dollar. It is issued by Circle Internet Financial, a subsidiary of Circle Internet Group, and is backed by a reserve of cash and short-dated US government obligations held mostly in a money market fund managed by BlackRock. Businesses with a Circle Mint account can mint USDC by depositing dollars and redeem it for dollars one for one. Launched in September 2018 and governed until 2023 through the Centre Consortium, a joint venture with Coinbase, USDC is now issued natively on dozens of blockchains and can be moved between them with Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol.¹²³⁴⁵⁶

HistoryReport an error

Circle and the launch

Circle was founded in 2013 by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville.¹ Neville left the company in early 2020 but remained on its board.⁷ Centre began as a Circle initiative, first announced in 2017, to build a payments network.⁸

Circle announced USDC at CoinDesk's Consensus conference in May 2018 and released it for limited trading on 26 September 2018. It was first issued to partner institutions and was available at launch on several exchanges, including Poloniex, which Circle had acquired earlier that year.³⁹

On 23 October 2018 Circle and Coinbase launched the Centre Consortium, a joint venture to set standards for stablecoins, with USDC as its first product. The same day Coinbase began supporting USDC, an ERC-20 token on Ethereum; it was the exchange's first stablecoin.¹⁰⁸⁹

SPAC merger attempt

On 8 July 2021 Circle announced that it would go public by merging with Concord Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company chaired by former Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond. The deal valued Circle at US$4.5 billion, and the combined company was to trade on the New York Stock Exchange as CRCL.¹¹ The agreement was renegotiated in February 2022 at a valuation of about US$9 billion.¹²

Concord had until 10 December 2022 to complete a merger. An extension required the SEC to declare the deal's S-4 registration statement effective, which had not happened, and on 5 December 2022 the two companies agreed to terminate the deal. Allaire said Circle was "disappointed the proposed transaction timed out".¹³

End of Centre and the Coinbase agreement

On 21 August 2023 Circle and Coinbase announced that Centre would be wound up. Circle became the sole issuer of USDC and took over its governance, while Coinbase took a minority equity stake in Circle.¹⁴ Circle's IPO filing states that it acquired the remaining 50% of Centre Consortium LLC in August 2023 and dissolved Centre in December 2023.¹

The two companies signed a Collaboration Agreement in August 2023 that governs how reserve income is shared. Circle retains a small portion of the income generated by the reserves, and Coinbase receives 50% of the residual after payments to other approved participants, with its share increasing with the proportion of USDC held on Coinbase's platform. Circle reported distribution costs to Coinbase of US$248.1 million in 2022, US$691.3 million in 2023, and US$907.9 million in 2024.¹

Public listing and US regulation

Circle filed publicly for an initial public offering on 1 April 2025.¹ It priced 34 million shares, including shares sold by existing shareholders, at US$31 each, raising about US$1.1 billion, and its stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CRCL in June 2025.¹⁵

On 18 July 2025 President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act, a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, after the House passed it by 308 votes to 122. The law requires stablecoins to be backed in full by dollars or similarly liquid assets and requires annual audits for issuers above US$50 billion.¹⁶ It also bars issuers from paying yield directly to holders. Issuers have instead passed reserve income to distributors: Circle shares its reserve income with Coinbase, which funds rewards for USDC holders. A March 2026 draft of the CLARITY Act, a separate market-structure bill, proposed restricting rewards paid on stablecoin balances.¹⁷

Circle applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on 30 June 2025 to charter a national trust bank, First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A., which it said would oversee the USDC reserve and offer digital asset custody. The OCC granted conditional approval on 12 December 2025.¹⁸ Final approval followed on 10 July 2026. The bank, operating as Circle National Trust, will initially provide custody for Circle and its affiliates, with management of the USDC reserve deferred to a later phase. Senator Elizabeth Warren criticised the OCC for granting such charters to companies she said did not qualify under the National Bank Act.¹⁹ On 31 July 2026 the New York Department of Financial Services granted Circle a limited purpose trust charter,²⁰ and The Block reported that USDC issuance would move to a New York trust company.¹⁹

Europe and EURC

Circle launched EURC, a euro-denominated stablecoin, in June 2022. It is issued by Circle Internet Financial Europe SAS, and its reserves are held in cash.¹ From 1 July 2024 the French subsidiary also became a second issuer of USDC, serving holders in the European Economic Area.⁴ Circle states that in July 2024 it became the first global stablecoin issuer to comply with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).¹

2025–2026

USDC launched natively on Hyperliquid in September 2025, and Circle took a stake in Hyperliquid's HYPE token.²¹ In May 2026 Coinbase became Hyperliquid's official USDC treasury deployer, and the rival USDH stablecoin was set to be phased out.²²

In late June 2026 Open Standard announced Open USD, a stablecoin backed by Coinbase, Visa, and Mastercard, which Mastercard's chief executive described as a payments-focused utility with shared economics. Coinbase said it had met the conditions to renew its commercial agreement with Circle and would continue to grow USDC.²³ In October 2026 Circle published a defence of its economics, stating that distribution and transaction costs took US$819 million of about US$1.4 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026.²⁴

In September 2026 Binance bought US$100 million of Circle shares as part of a five-year agreement to promote USDC, under which Circle pays Binance a monthly incentive fee based on USDC held through Circle's Modular Smart Contract Wallet service.²⁵

Reserves and attestationsReport an error

Circle states that USDC is backed by cash and cash-equivalent assets so that it is redeemable one for one for dollars.²⁶ Only holders with a Circle Mint account can redeem directly with Circle; others redeem through exchanges and other intermediaries.⁴ In July 2022 about 80% of the reserve was held in short-dated US Treasuries and 20% in cash, with BNY Mellon as the primary custodian.²⁷

Since January 2023 the reserves have been limited to cash at banks and the Circle Reserve Fund.¹ The fund is a government money market fund registered under Rule 2a-7 of the Investment Company Act of 1940, managed by BlackRock and available only to Circle. Most cash is held at banks designated as global systemically important banks.¹ Circle publishes reserve holdings weekly, and BlackRock publishes daily data on the fund's portfolio.²

Grant Thornton issued an attestation of the USDC reserve in November 2018, reporting US$127,412,240.89 in custody against 127,408,827 USDC in circulation at the end of October 2018. An attestation checks a specific statement, such as that reserves cover tokens in circulation, and is narrower than a full audit.²⁸ In January 2023 Circle said Deloitte would replace Grant Thornton as the auditor of its financial statements and of the USDC reserve.²⁹ As of October 2026 Circle's transparency page states that monthly assurance is provided by a Big Four accounting firm.²

How it worksReport an error

Native issuance and bridged USDC

Circle mints USDC directly on each blockchain it supports. Circle's developer documentation lists USDC contracts on 38 mainnets as of October 2026, including Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Base, OP Mainnet, and Circle's own Arc chain.⁵ The number had been 15 after an expansion announced in August 2023,³⁰ and 19 in Circle's 2025 IPO filing.¹ On Ethereum the token is an upgradeable proxy contract with six decimal places.³¹

On chains where Circle does not issue USDC, third parties can lock USDC on one chain and issue a bridged version on another. Circle does not issue or redeem bridged USDC, and it is not compatible with CCTP. Under the Bridged USDC Standard, introduced in November 2023, a team can deploy a bridged token that Circle may later take over and upgrade to native USDC, by agreement with that team, keeping the same contract address and balances.³²

Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol

Circle unveiled CCTP in April 2023 with Ethereum and Avalanche as the first chains.³⁰ Instead of locking tokens in a bridge, CCTP burns USDC on the source chain and mints the same amount on the destination chain after Circle's attestation service, Iris, signs the burn. Version 2 offers Fast Transfers, attested in about 8 to 20 seconds, alongside Standard Transfers, which take 15 to 19 minutes on Ethereum and its layer 2 networks. It also supports hooks that trigger actions on the destination chain. Circle describes version 1 as legacy.⁶

Blocking and freezing

Circle's terms reserve the right to block USDC addresses that Circle determines may be associated with illegal activity, preventing transfers to and from them, and to freeze USDC when it receives a legal order from a government authority.⁴ Circle's accounts refer to these as "access denied" tokens: when it denies access to tokens, Circle moves the related reserves into a segregated account. Such balances were US$91.8 million at the end of 2024.¹

Arc

Arc is a layer 1 blockchain developed by Circle that uses USDC to pay transaction fees. Its public testnet launched in October 2025 and its mainnet on 16 September 2026.³³³⁴ Arc is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine³⁵ and runs Malachite, a consensus engine based on Tendermint, under proof of authority.³³³⁴ Circle named 11 founding validators, among them BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, and Visa, and is exploring a move to proof of stake in 2027. Circle minted 10 billion ARC tokens at genesis but states that this is not a commitment to a public token launch.³⁴

Incidents and controversiesReport an error

• Tornado Cash (August 2022). After the US Treasury sanctioned the Tornado Cash mixer on 8 August 2022,³⁶ Circle blacklisted 38 addresses linked to the mixer, freezing over US$75,000 of USDC.³⁷³⁸ The Treasury lifted the sanctions on 21 March 2025.³⁹
• Silicon Valley Bank (March 2023). Silicon Valley Bank was placed in receivership on 10 March 2023. That night Circle disclosed that US$3.3 billion of USDC reserves, about 8%, were held there and could not be withdrawn. USDC fell to about 86 cents. It recovered after the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC announced on 12 March that all SVB depositors would be protected, and fully recovered when Circle began processing redemptions on 13 March.⁴⁰⁴¹ Coinbase and Binance temporarily suspended USDC conversions during the episode.⁴²
• Drift exploit (April 2026). On 1 April 2026 the Solana exchange Drift was drained of about US$285 million in an attack that security firms suspected was the work of North Korean hackers. The attacker used CCTP to move about US$232 million in USDC from Solana to Ethereum. The investigator ZachXBT said Circle could have acted faster to freeze the funds. Others, including Plume's general counsel, said freezing without a court order or law enforcement request would expose issuers to legal risk.⁴³ ZachXBT said Circle's inaction in more than a dozen cases since 2022 had let over US$420 million in illicit funds escape, while the Columbia Business School adjunct professor Omid Malekan warned that discretionary freezes would concentrate control in one company. Allaire said Circle freezes wallets "at the direction of law enforcement or the courts", not at its own discretion during an exploit.⁴⁴ On 16 April 2026 Drift announced it would relaunch using Tether's USDT, with up to US$147.5 million in funding, mostly from Tether.⁴⁵
• Bitget hack (September 2026). After an exploit of the Bitget exchange on 24 September 2026, Circle blacklisted a wallet holding about 100,000 USDC, and Tether followed. Other addresses linked to the US$351.6 million exploit held more than 63,000 ether, which no issuer can freeze.⁴⁶
• Dependence on an issuer. USDC relies on Circle as a central issuer: Circle can block addresses, and the reserve is held at banks and in a single money market fund. Circle's IPO filing lists risks tied to the Reserve Fund's issuer, manager, and custodian, and cites the failure of US regional banks in March 2023 as the cause of a temporary price dislocation.¹

TimelineReport an error

See alsoReport an error

• Tether, issuer of USDT, the other major dollar stablecoin
• Terra, whose algorithmic stablecoin collapsed in 2022
• Ethereum
• Solana
• Base
• Hyperliquid, where USDC is the main quote asset

ReferencesReport an error