Second-Largest Stablecoin USDC Launches on Ethereum (ETH) Competitor NEAR Protocol (NEAR)

The second-largest stablecoin by market cap, USD Coin (USDC), is now available natively on the Ethereum (ETH) competitor NEAR Protocol (NEAR).

In addition to NEAR, USDC is also available natively on Algorand (ALGO), Arbitrum ( ARB), Avalanche (AVAX), Base, Ethereum, Flow, Hedera (HBAR), Noble, Optimism (OP), Solana (SOL), Stellar (XLM), and Tron (TRX).

Explains USDC’s issuer Circle,

“Developers can now take advantage of the speed and scalability of the NEAR blockchain to build fast, user-friendly apps with USDC and coded in popular programming languages like JavaScript and Rust.”

Top US crypto exchange Coinbase and Circle co-created USDC in 2018 and jointly managed the asset, which aims to maintain a peg to the US dollar, through the Centre Consortium until last month.

In August, Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said that Circle would bring all of USDC’s governance and operations responsibilities in-house. The CEOs also noted that Coinbase planned to purchase an equity stake in Circle.

NEAR is trading at $1.10 at time of writing. The 42nd-ranked crypto asset by market cap is up more than 1.6% in the past 24 hours.

NEAR Protocol says it’s focused on scalability and stability. The project aims to allow developers to build decentralized applications at low cost.

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