On Thursday (August 27), CENTRE Consortium, announced that USD Coin (USDC), “the fastest growing, fully reserved digital dollar stablecoin”, which currently has a market cap of over $1.4 billion, had received a major update.
The CENTRE Consortium, which was co-founded by Coinbase and Circle in October 2018 as “a joint venture aimed at establishing a standard for fiat on the internet and providing a governance framework and network for the global, mainstream adoption of fiat stablecoins.”
According to CENTRE’s blog post, there has been “a major upgrade to the USD Coin (USDC) protocol and smart contract, making it significantly easier for people to use USDC in payments, commerce and peer-to-peer transactions.” This update also brings “additional security infrastructure to the USDC smart contract.”
In USDC 2.0, we have the concept of “gasless sends,” which “enables wallet developers to abstract away the complexity of gas fees (and the need for the customer to hold a balance of ether) and instead to delegate the payment of the gas fees to another address.”
Here is CENTRE explaining what this means for developers:
“This allows developers to either provide that service themselves, or allows a third party service to pay the related fees.
“In other words, developers can either pay the fees on behalf of the customer or present and deduct the fees in USDC.
“With this innovation, digital wallet developers can build user experiences that more closely resemble the experience of existing mobile payment apps — customers will be able to send and receive USDC payments on a peer-to-peer basis solely using USDC, with fees expressed and paid in USDC.”
USDC 2.0 also offers “improved security and administration” as explained below:
“USDC and Centre operate with a core set of administrative tasks and functions that require the involvement of key technical, security and operational teams at issuers, and many of these tasks are handled through off-line manual processes.
“USDC 2.0 introduces a new set of on-chain multiple-signature contracts, including new consensus mechanisms, which will help to improve the resiliency and growth of Centre and shift off-line human processes into on-chain multiple signature processes.
“Administrative operations can be managed on-chain versus manual off-chain processes, which improves security, auditability and in turn resilience.”
Both of CENTRE’s founding members “intend to introduce support for these protocol improvements in their respective products and services.”
Featured Image by “NikolayFrolochkin” via Pixabay.com
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
