The USDC is a stablecoin on par with the US dollar. For each USDC token, Circle will deposit 1 USD to the designated bank (Silvergate Bank) and send a USDC token to the user.

USDC is based on the open source developed by CENTER, and is currently managed by a consortium that includes Circle and Coinbase. Businesses looking to use USDC take advantage of Circle APIs to make card payments, transfers, ACH transfers, and other types of payments that settle in USDC within a Wallet.

USDC natively supports multiple Layer 1 blockchains, including Ethereum as an ERC-20 token, Algorand as an ASA token, Solana as an SPL token, TRON as a TRC-20 token, and Stellar as a native asset.

As an open standard and public smart contract, USDC has rapidly grown into the world's largest stablecoin industry ecosystem. Hundreds of companies, products, and services support the USDC standard, including wallets, cryptocurrency exchanges, DeFi protocols, savings, lending, and payment services.

In October 2018, Circle and Coinbase jointly announced the inauguration of the CENTER consortium and launched their first stablecoin, USDC. Since then, Circle and Coinbase have been committed to building and establishing the CENTER network.

CENTER members also jointly contributed to the development of open source software and technical standards supporting the CENTER network protocol (from USDC).

As more goods and services are tokenized, smart contract platforms will become the building blocks of value exchange. Namely, it allows fiat currencies to interact with smart contracts, giving developers a viable way to use real-world currencies on the Blockchain.

CENTER stablecoins are issued by authorized and regulated financial institutions. US dollar reserves for USDC are endorsed by the top five accounting services firms, including Grant Thornton LLP, which will publish monthly reports on these reserves.

Circle is the company with the highest number of licenses in the crypto-assets industry. It currently has paid licenses in the United States (including BitLicense in New York State), the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

Professional services firm Grant Thornton will publicly report the USDC financial statement issued by Circle each month. This measure of independent third-party audits maximizes the safety of client funds and addresses all pain points in today's stablecoin market against the Dollar.

Founded in 2012, Coinbase is a registered trading platform in the United States with a legal license to trade cryptocurrency. It has proposed high KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) security standards for all registered users. Today's business mainly includes Bitcoin Wallets and exchanges that allow merchants and consumers to use cryptocurrencies for their transactions. Coinbase's business covers more than 100 countries, approximately 43 million individual users, 7,000 institutions, and 115,000 ecosystem partners.

On April 14, 2021, Coinbase was listed on the Nasdaq under the stock ticker "COIN". It is the first formally licensed exchange in the United States and the first publicly traded cryptocurrency company.