Circle Announces Support for Polygon USDC to Help Developers Seamlessly Build and Transact in Web3’s Largest Ecosystem

Faster access to Polygon USDC via the Circle Account and APIs enables businesses and developers to benefit from lower costs and faster settlement times

BOSTON, June 7, 2022 — Circle Internet Financial, LLC, a global financial technology firm that provides internet-based payments and financial infrastructure to businesses of all sizes, and the issuer of USD Coin (USDC), today announced support for Polygon USDC on Circle’s payments and treasury platform. Developers building on Circle APIs will be able to more easily automate flows from fiat into Polygon USDC, a key feature for many emerging DeFi, payments, and NFT application use cases. Support within the Circle Account gives businesses, exchanges and institutional traders faster and easier access to Polygon USDC, including the ability to swap it for native USDC across eight other blockchain networks. 

Polygon USDC is the first ‘bridged’ version of USDC to gain support on Circle’s platform. The Circle Account will abstract away the costly and time-consuming process of bridging USDC from Ethereum to Polygon manually via the Polygon Bridge, enabling businesses to convert fiat currency to Polygon USDC in seconds, and easily convert back to fiat currency¹.

Now, businesses and developers can use Circle’s payments and treasury platform to easily accept payments in Polygon USDC, make programmatic global payouts, and manage accounts infrastructure for their customers. Institutional traders can automate access to Polygon USDC with a Circle Account for use in crypto capital markets.

“Polygon is an attractive entry point for businesses and developers to build in an established and liquid ecosystem with faster settlement times and reduced costs,” said Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Co-founder of Circle. “Supporting Polygon USDC in the Circle Account and Circle APIs is another step toward making USDC interoperable across more leading blockchains, helping foster greater adoption for dollar digital currency on the internet.” 

Polygon is a leading layer-2 scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain, which has the largest developer ecosystem and deepest liquidity across Web3. With the Polygon Bridge, users can access digital assets on Ethereum and take advantage of faster and more affordable transactions on Polygon’s efficient network. Recently, Polygon pledged $20 million toward a series of community initiatives to combat climate change, with the goal to achieve carbon-negative status in 2022.

“We are excited to see one of the fastest growing dollar digital currencies in the space become available on Polygon,” said Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon. “Polygon USDC will enable businesses and exchanges in our ecosystem to expand the DeFi community further, providing their growing user base a seamless and cost-effective experience.”

In addition to supporting bridged USDC on Polygon, Circle issues USDC natively on Algorand, Avalanche, Ethereum, Flow, Hedera, Solana, Stellar and TRON. With more than $54 billion in circulation² as of June 1, 2022, USDC is one of the largest dollar digital currencies. Seamless interoperability within the growing multi-chain ecosystem aims to establish USDC as a standard means of value transfer across the internet.

Learn more about Polygon USDC or sign up for a Circle Account today.

¹ As a bridged version of USDC, Polygon USDC is not directly redeemable for U.S. dollars; it must be ‘unbridged’ to be redeemed for U.S. dollars. When a Circle Account customer requests a withdrawal of U.S. dollars, Circle will automate the process of unbridging Polygon USDC back to Ethereum USDC, and redeem Ethereum USDC for U.S. dollars. This unbridging and redemption process is abstracted away from the customer and comes at no additional cost.

² Existing circulation of USDC that is bridged from one blockchain to another (e.g. USDC bridged from Ethereum to Polygon) does not increase the total amount of USDC in circulation.