USDC circulation on the Solana blockchain has increased from 1 billion to 2 billion in just two weeks amid huge price gains by Solana. The growth in circulation shows the huge potential of the USDC and Solana protocol to becoming dominant in driving future internet payments, banking, and capital markets. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said this in a tweet yesterday, adding that the efforts to introduce the protocol one year ago are now bearing good fruits.  

“We are getting SO MUCH CLOSER to the vision being realized. One can easily make P2P payments with USDC using @ftx_app (hosted) and @phantom (un-hosted) at virtually no cost and in seconds. Bye-bye @Venmo, but global scale.”

USDC, which is managed by Circle through Center consortium, is a very popular stable coin now natively integrated on the Solana blockchain. This means anyone building products, services and decentralized finance dApps on the Solana blockchain can leverage this connection to facilitate digital payments, banking services, and capital markets with the stable coin. Solana is thought of as a great competitor for Ethereum, supporting smart contracts, scalability with up to 70,000 transactions per second, and immense settlement speeds of 400 milliseconds at a fraction of cost.  

The growth explosion of USDC on Solana is due to the many developers and fintech who are now using the Circle API, a multichain protocol for their dApps and businesses, said Allaire. With the Circle protocol, developers and fintech can integrate cards, banks, wire transfers, and wallets with USDC on Solana. Wallets, exchanges, trading firms, market makers, and custodians can now support the instant transfer of USDC across multiple chains through swaps using the Circle USDC API. The swaps and transfers can also be performed by customers on Ethereum and Algorand.

In fact, many more developers have been building DeFi dApps and creating non-fungible tokens on Solana in the recent past because of its low cost, scalability, and speed benefits over other blockchains that support smart contracts. That is without mentioning the craze about NFTs in the recent past. USDC is important for DeFi networks for purposes of holding value away from the problems of crypto volatility.

Furthermore, the USDC in Solana protocol is also being used by native or legacy financial institutions, not just crypto and fintech according to Allaire. Legacy or traditional financial institutions can also leverage the API to connect to global payment, commercial, and financial systems and to facilitate quick and low-cost transactions.

Allaire said the ability to connect the platform to consumer and institutional customers will help accelerate usage in global payments, banking, and capital markets.