Circle, represented by its co-founder Jeremy Allaire, announced today that it intends to concentrate all its resources on the development of the USDC stablecoin, thus also selling the SeedInvest crowdfunding platform purchased only a year ago.
With this in mind, Circle today launched new APIs and the so-called Circle Business Account, a solution for companies to manage payments with the USDC stablecoin.
USDC is in fact pegged 1 to 1 to the value of the US dollar. It is an ERC20 token, meaning that it complies with the Ethereum blockchain standard.
As a result, Circle actually wants to challenge Tether (USDT) in the “battle” for the supremacy of the best stablecoin. As of now, Tether is the most widely used stablecoin in the world and is currently ranked 5th on CoinMarketCap with volumes exceeding $52 billion in the last 24 hours.
Allaire explained to Coindesk:
“We’ve been executing like crazy on USDC. We’ve tokenized over $1.6 billion in USDC, crossed the $500 million market cap recently”.
All the sales of Circle
Circle has also recently sold Poloniex to Justin Sun, CEO of the TRON Foundation, and lost half of its employees. Whereas in December, Kraken acquired the Over the Counter (OTC) platform developed by Circle. It appears that Circle is abandoning all its projects to focus only on USDC.
Prior to that, Circle had also sold Circle Pay and Circle Invest.
Allaire added:
“We had about 100 people who went with these different spinouts … [it was] a natural way for people to go with those businesses and product lines”.
It is not yet clear whether the company will also expand the offer of its stablecoins by launching tokens pegged to other assets, which is what Tether did recently with Tether Gold (XAUT).
