USDC issuing circle adds Arbitrum to the Web3 platform
Cirque Internet Financial, the manager of the dollar-backed stablecoin US dollar coin (USDC), announced in a September 12 blog post that it has integrated Layer-2 scaling chain Arbittrum into its Web3 infrastructure platform.
The Web3 platform brings a USDC-centric programmable wallet, smart contract utility and gas bill draft to Arbitrum, the blog post said. With a total value locked (TVL) of around $2.5 billion, Arbitrum is Ethereum's (ETH) largest Layer 2, according to Defillama.
Nikhil Chandhok, chief product officer of Circle, said in a post on the X platform that the platform helps developers build “frictionless in-app wallets that support USDC for global payments, e-commerce. [and] Game” among other use cases.
Stablecoins by market capitalization. Source: CoinMarketCap
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Circle's Web3 Tooling is also integrated with blockchain networks including Avalanche, Ethereum, Polygon PoS and Solana, the blog post said.
The merger is Circle's latest bid to accelerate USDC adoption as the stablecoin competes with Tether USDT for market dominance. At around $35 billion, USDC's total market capitalization lags far behind that of rival USDT, which is more than $118 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
In the year PayPal's US dollar stablecoin, PayPal US (PYUSD), which launched in 2023, has added to the competition. It hit $1 billion in total market capitalization in August.
In the year In 2023, Circle made USDC natively available on Arbitrum, allowing apps to create USDC directly on Layer-2 rather than needing to connect USDC to other chains. It also effectively integrates the free USDC bridge into a cross-chain transfer protocol by managing arbitrage on-chain slicing and burning.
Arbitrum is an especially important platform for Circle as it is the hub for decentralized finance (DeFi) between layer-2s. According to Defillama, Arbitrum has $4.7 billion worth of stablecoins available for use in everything from loans to decentralized exchanges (DEX) to perpetual trading.
Arbitrum has also been interested in tokenized real-world assets (RWA), which could become a multi-trillion dollar market in the coming years, an executive at rival blockchain network Polygon told Cointelegraph in August.
In the year On August 27, Ondo Finance announced that the RWA protocol is expanding access to Ondo's US Dollar Yield Token (USDY) to Arbitrum. In the year On August 8, asset manager Franklin Templeton announced that FOBXX is expanding into a scale chain.
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