Circle plans to only support Ethereum PoS chain after Merge is complete

On Tuesday, Circle, the issuer of the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin, pledged its full support for the transition of Ethereum to a proof-of-stake, or PoS, blockchain after the much-anticipated Merge upgrade. The firm views the Merge as an important milestone in the scaling of the Ethereum ecosystem, writing:

“USDC has become a core building block for Ethereum DeFi innovation. It has facilitated the adoption of L2 solutions and helped broaden the set of use cases that today rely on Ethereum’s vast suite of capabilities. We understand the responsibility we have for the Ethereum ecosystem and businesses, developers and end users that depend on USDC, and we intend to do the right thing.”

Currently, USDC is both the largest dollar-backed stablecoin issued on Ethereum and the largest ERC-20 asset overall, with over $45 billion in market capitalization residing in the ecosystem at the time of publication. Its reserves are audited and held at U.S. financial institutions such as BlackRock. 

Unlike others, Circle continued that it doesn’t expect any issues as the Ethereum blockchain begins its transition, stating:

“We do not anticipate disruptions to USDC on-chain capabilities nor to our fully automated issuance and redemption services. Circle’s testing environment is connected to the Goerli Ethereum testnet, and we will monitor closely as it merges with Prater in the coming days.”

The company is following suit alongside an increasing number of firms that vouch to transition to Ethereum’s PoS blockchain upon completing the Merge. The day prior, Chainlink said it would not support any proof-of-work forks after the upgrade. Due to the proximity of the upgrade, Ethereum layer-2 solution Optimism has seen its token skyrocket by over 300% due to Merge speculation. 

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