Visa has teamed up with blockchain services company Circle to make USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin transactions compatible with certain credit cards. “After Circle itself graduates from Visa’s Fast Track program, likely sometime next year, Visa will issue a credit card that lets businesses send and receive USDC payments directly from any business using the card,” said a Forbes article on Wednesday. Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, told Forbes: “This will be the first, corporate card that will allow businesses to be able to spend a balance of USDC.” Down the road, the collaboration will facilitate USDC transactions between cross-border …

Originally launched as an attractive alternative to traditional fiat business accounts for Internet-based ventures, the latest features for the Circle Business Account appear to take aim at a different kind of competitor: the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. Circle, the Goldman Sachs-backed payments company and issuer of the USDC stablecoin, announced their Circle Business Account service on March 10, 2020. The accounts featured a suite of services designed to help businesses leverage USDC, including APIs that could connect to traditional payment rails, accept dollar-denominated payments as USDC, a USDC wallet service, and access multiple e-commerce marketplaces. However, given the yields stablecoins …

There has been significant excitement in the industry since PayPal last week announced its intention to enter the cryptocurrency market. The rollout of its new crypto services — enabling both crypto payments and direct, in-app purchases of crypto — has been officially set for early 2021. Yet on Oct. 28, the co-founder and CEO of crypto payments firm Circle, Jeremy Allaire, claimed to have used the PayPal app to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin (BTC), tweeting a screenshot of the apparent transaction. Bought $100 in BTC on @PayPal ! Great milestone for the market! pic.twitter.com/jsxAxTpGgK — Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) October …

The Centre consortium announced on Thursday that USD Coin (USDC) will soon be available on the Stellar blockchain. This marks the first time that a major stablecoin will be made available on the platform, joining the ranks of Anchor USD, WhiteStandard and some others. USDC is currently the second largest stablecoin in the market behind Tether (USDT). Circle said that USDC is expected to be available on Stellar in Q1 2021. USDC is primarily hosted on Ethereum, which holds virtually the entirety of its supply at $2.7 billion. Algorand was onboarded in June 2020, though it found limited success — …

As part of an initiative bringing stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) to other blockchains, USDC is now available on the public Algorand blockchain. This is in addition to its existing availability as an Ethereum-based token. Offering USDC on Algorand gives the asset layer 1 scalability, touting more than 1,000 transactions per second, or TPS, while costing less than a penny in fees (1/20 of one cent to be precise), said a statement provided to Cointelegraph. “This is a defining milestone for frictionless mainstream payments as well as sophisticated financial applications,” Algorand Inc.'s founder, Silvio Micali, said in the statement, adding: “This …

Centre, the company that issues the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) has blacklisted an Ethereum address holding $100,000 in USDC in response to a law enforcement request. In the first of its kind, the address had a “blacklist(address investor)” function called on June 16, 2020. It’s not yet clear the reason behind the law enforcement request, but Centre Consortium — founded by Circle and Coinbase — did release a statement confirming the blacklisting: “Centre can confirm it blacklisted an address in response to a request from law enforcement. While we cannot comment on the specifics of law enforcement requests, Centre complies …

USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin project founded by Coinbase and Circle, has hit a major milestone in market capitalization. On July 3, 2020, USDC market cap broke the $1 billion threshold for the first time since the stablecoin was launched in October 2018. According to data from Coin360, the coin has seen sharp growth since March 2020. USDC, the second-largest USD-pegged stablecoin after Tether (USDT), is ranked the 17th largest cryptocurrency by market cap as of press time. USD Coin all-time chart. Source: Coin360 Announcing the news on Thursday, the Centre Consortium — an organization co-founded by Circle and Coinbase …

In a June 25 interview with Circle’s Jeremy Allaire, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers talked about crypto’s ability to patch up the modern financial system, particularly calling out the great difficulty in processing global payments. Moderation in all things? Describing himself as falling between “Bitcoin evangelists and high traditionalists,” Summers was cautious about aligning himself with the more extreme use cases for crypto. Specifically, Summers dismissed arguments common in crypto about monetary collapse brought about by quantitative easing, as well as the need to maintain private transactions. “I don’t read existing currencies as being on their way to being …

The Algorand Foundation has announced that the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin will be launched on the Algorand (ALGO) blockchain. The integration will allow customers using Circle APIs or Circle Business Accounts to convert funds from their bank account or card network into stable tokens on the Algorand blockchain. USDC currently ranks as the second-largest stablecoin by market cap, and the 19th-biggest crypto asset with a capitalization of nearly $930 million. The coin was developed as a joint venture comprising Circle and major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. USDC is coming to Algorand USDC has purportedly issued more than $2.5 billion to date, …

As the global economy trembles, investors continue to find sanctuary in stablecoins. In the most recent 12-month period (ending April 29, 2020), the three top stablecoins — Tether (USDT), Circle (USDC) and Paxos (PAX) — increased their market capitalization by 161%, 191% and 146%, respectively. Kim Grauer, head of research at Chainalysis, told Cointelegraph that with the use of a different metric, “We can confirm a 250% increase in the amount of Tether moved on-chain in the past 12-months (ending March 2020),” and the growth isn’t all front-loaded, either. As COVID-19 raged, President Trump declared a national emergency in the …

Crypto trade service firm, Voyager Digital Canada, has completed its acquisition of Circle’s retail-facing investment app. On April 3, Voyager announced it had onboarded Circle Invest’s more than 40,000 accounts onto its platform — excluding residents of New York, North Carolina, and Alaska. Voyager now reports a user base of more than 200,000 in total. Circle Invest was sold in exchange for a 4% stake in Voyager in February. Voyager onboards Circle Invest clients Voyager offers commission-free trading on 34 crypto assets and USD. The firm will continue to offer Circle Invest’s collections feature — allowing customers to purchase baskets …

MakerDAO, leading player in the decentralized finance sector, is facing liquidity risk in an uncertain market. The MakerDAO community is considering adding support for USDC, the cryptocurrency associated with Circle, as an alternative collateral to help bear this risk, according to a community thread on March 16. MakerDAO’s Foundation Dev Team had a call on the matter at 11 AM ET today, discussing the code for the USDC collateral adaptor — a recording of that call is available here. According to the post describing potential USDC collateral support, the move would allow for locking up USDC, minting DAI and selling …