USDC 2.0 Offers Gasless Stablecoin Transfers

August 29, 2020 John Coinbase 0

Centre Consortium has upgraded USDC to accommodate gasless transfers.

 

USDC 2.0 makes this possible through meta-transactions – a means for developers or any third party to pay gas fees on behalf of their user by delegating fees to another address. With the new version, users sending USDC no longer have to bear gas costs when covered by the provider. This is a huge move which greatly reduces the barrier of entry, especially during times of congestion in which transfers can cost upwards of $5, regardless of how much USDC is actually being sent. 

 

Centre has also confirmed that this update is backwards compatible, implying that the old clients can continue to use the network without having to upgrade their clients. The same goes for the exchanges, wallet providers and products using USDC. Centre has also released a set of new on-chain signature schematics to help govern and onboard new partners.

The USDC 2.0 update is currently live, meaning any wallet provider can start using the new features today Both Coinbase and Circle, the members of the consortium, have stated that they plan to integrate these protocol improvements in their respective products and services. Shortly after launch, Uniswap developer Noah Zinsmeister was the first to test the gasless token swap on the leading DEX.

 

USDC is the second largest stablecoin, currently boasting a marketcap of $1.4B and counting. It is managed by the Centre Consortium, an entity comprises of Circle (founder), Coinbase, Bitmain and many more, with Circle and Coinbase being the issuers of USDC.

Stablecoin Supremacy

It is no secret that stablecoins are in huge demand these days. While USDC has decided to go with their own way of solving the gas fees issue by introducing gasless sends, other stablecoins are taking a different approach, opting to go with Layer-2 solutions.

The largest stablecoin, Tether (USDT), boasts a $10B marketcap, recently partnered with OMG network to lower the gas fees and scale their network using their new L2 scaling solution.

Binance USD (BUSD), a stablecoin issued by Binance in partnership with Paxos and regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), has also announced that they will be integrating with LoopRing to use their Layer-2 zkRollups technology to scale the network and combat gas fees.

This comes in tandem with new contenders like mStable’s mUSD and DefiDollar’s DUSD, both of which look to compete for the DeFi basket market share

If nothing else, the demand for stablecoins will only continue to grow. With it, we expect to see plenty of new functions to ease and encourage usage over the coming months.