Circle, the digital payment company behind the widely-used USDC stablecoin, is announcing its intentions to become a full-reserve national commercial bank.
Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, shares in a blog post his company’s plans to pursue a commercial banking license in the US, along with his perspective on the future for USDC.
“Circle intends to become a full-reserve national commercial bank, operating under the supervision and risk management requirements of the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury, OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency), and the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation). We believe that full-reserve banking, built on digital currency technology, can lead to not just a radically more efficient, but also a safer, more resilient financial system…
In the coming years, we anticipate that USDC will grow into hundreds of billions of dollars in circulation, continue to support trillions of dollars in low-friction, high-trust economic activity and become widely used in financial services and internet commerce applications. Establishing national regulatory standards for dollar digital currencies is crucial to enabling the potential of digital currencies in the real economy, including standards for reserve management and composition.”
Launched just three years ago, USDC quickly became the second-largest stablecoin in circulation. According to CoinGecko, USDC bolsters a market cap of over $28 billion, falling short of the top stablecoin, USDT, which has more than $63 billion in circulation.
In the past week, Christopher Waller, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, highlighted some of the advantages that stablecoins like USDC could bring to the general public.
“If one or more stablecoin arrangements can develop a significant user base, they could become a major challenger to banks for processing payments. Importantly, payments using such stablecoins might be ‘free’ in the sense that there would be no fee required to initiate or receive a payment. Accordingly, one can easily imagine that competition from stablecoins could pressure banks to reduce their markup for payment services.”
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