Circle Expands Native Issuance of $26 Billion USDC Stablecoin to Celo Network

According to CoinDesk, stablecoin issuer Circle has expanded the native issuance of its $26 billion stablecoin USDC to the Celo network. The Celo Foundation announced the development on Tuesday, aiming to boost cross-border payments and peer-to-peer transactions in developing regions and facilitate conversion from local currencies. CLabs, an organization dedicated to Celo ecosystem development, will also propose a community vote to enable paying transaction fees (gas) with the USDC stablecoin. The USDC expansion comes as Celo increasingly competes to be an essential infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets (RWA), placing traditional investments such as bonds and credit on blockchains in a token form and using stablecoins for settlements. RWA-focused marketplace Untangled Finance and credit platform Huma have expanded to the network in recent months. Isha Varshney, head of strategy and innovation at the Celo Foundation, said in a statement, 'The Celo ecosystem is excited to bring more RWAs on-chain through our partnership with Circle and the launch of USDC on Celo. We want to be the best ecosystem for stablecoins, which has proven to be among the industry’s prevailing use cases, as institutional investors come into Web3.' Celo is currently in the process of transitioning from its standalone blockchain to become an Ethereum-based layer 2 network.