Stablecoins

What Is USDC?

Basics Also known as what is usdc what is usdc erc20 is usdc erc20 usdc meaning

In short

USDC is a stablecoin issued by Circle and pegged to the US dollar: one USDC is meant to be worth one dollar at all times. It exists on more than a dozen blockchains, and the same token behaves identically on each of them.

Who issues USDC and what backs it

Circle, a US financial company, mints a USDC every time someone deposits a dollar and burns it when someone redeems. The reserve sits in cash and short-dated US Treasuries held at regulated institutions, and an accounting firm publishes an attestation on it every month.

That publication schedule is the practical difference between USDC and most of its competitors. Anyone can open the report and see what the reserve holds on a given date.

Supply stood at roughly 78,1 billion dollars in May 2026 according to DeFiLlama, which makes USDC the second largest stablecoin after USDT. Volume tells a different story: of the 33 trillion dollars that moved in stablecoins during 2025, USDC accounted for 18,3 trillion, per Artemis Analytics data reported by Bloomberg.

Which networks carry USDC

Ethereum, Base, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche and several others. The token is the same everywhere; what changes is the fee and the wait.

A transfer on Base or Solana costs around a cent and confirms in seconds. The same transfer as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum costs more and takes one to three minutes, longer when the network is busy.

This is where most errors happen. USDC sent on one network cannot be received on another, and a checkout that lets a customer pick the wrong one is a checkout that generates support tickets.

Why European merchants switched to USDC

MiCA, the EU regulation for crypto assets, set reserve, transparency and licensing requirements for stablecoin issuers. Circle met them. Tether did not.

European exchanges and payment providers responded by delisting USDT or narrowing its availability, and USDC became the stablecoin customers see at checkout in the EU. For a business operating there, accepting USDC now carries no compliance question; accepting USDT does.

Outside Europe the picture is unchanged. USDT remains dominant across Asia and Latin America, and a merchant selling globally has good reason to accept both.

Shopify made the direction obvious in 2026 by building USDC acceptance on Base directly into Shopify Payments, with automatic conversion to the merchant’s local currency.

Frequently asked

It carries the risks of any issuer-backed asset: the peg depends on Circle honouring redemptions and on the reserve being what the attestation says. Those attestations are published monthly and are public.

On Ethereum, yes. On Solana, Base or Polygon it follows those networks' standards instead. Same token, different rails.

Different issuers, different reserve disclosure practices, different regulatory standing in the EU, and different regional adoption.

It has briefly, in March 2023, when part of the reserve sat at a bank that failed. It recovered within days once the deposits were guaranteed.

Where your customers are decides it. In the EU, USDC. In Asia and Latin America, USDT. Selling to both, accept both.

Was this article helpful?

See also