Blockchain
Circle, the creator of US Greenback Coin (USDC), has launched a mainnet protocol that lets customers switch USDC between Ethereum and Avalanche, based on an April 26 announcement. Beforehand, Avalanche customers who held USDC on Ethereum needed to deposit their cash with a Circle companion or use a third-party bridge to switch their USDC from one community to the opposite. The brand new Cross-Chain Switch Protocol (CCTP) protocol seems to cast off this want for USDC bridges.
The crew launched a video on April 13 exhibiting how the brand new protocol works. In contrast to a standard bridge, it doesn’t lock tokens despatched to its contract. As an alternative, it fully destroys them and points new tokens on the receiving community. Customers can redeem these new tokens for financial institution deposits immediately, by depositing the tokens with Circle or its companions.
Within the announcement, the crew mentioned that it expects CCTP to unravel the issue of “fragmentation” within the Web3 ecosystem. At present, there are a number of unofficial variations of USDC floating round on varied networks, most of that are the results of tokens on one community being bridged to a different. Now that there’s an official option to switch cash from one community to a different, the crew expects these unofficial copies to slowly decline in use, making the token much less complicated to make use of.
The crew mentioned that lots of the largest cross-chain protocols have already pledged to make use of CCTP going ahead, together with Celer, Hyperlane, LayerZero, LI.FI, MetaMask, Wormhole and others.
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Joao Reginatto, Circle’s vice chairman of product, mentioned he believes the brand new protocol will assist enhance liquidity and capital effectivity in decentralized finance:
“With CCTP, builders can simplify the person expertise and their customers can belief that they’re all the time transacting with a extremely liquid, protected and fungible asset in native USDC.
USDC is a fiat-backed stablecoin issued by Circle. The corporate claims that every USDC token is backed dollar-for-dollar in its reserves. Customers can mint USDC by opening an account and depositing money with both Circle itself or one in every of its companions, corresponding to Coinbase. As soon as they’ve accomplished this, they’ll obtain the coin on a number of networks, together with Ethereum, Avalanche, Stellar and Polkadot.
Customers have misplaced billions of {dollars} value of USDC and different cryptocurrencies attributable to bridge hacks over the previous few years, as attackers have repeatedly discovered learn how to take away locked cash from bridge contracts and depart their copies on the receiving community with no backing. This has left builders questioning learn how to safe bridges for future use as digital belongings grow to be extra mainstream.
