Circle to Issue Its Stablecoin USDC on Celo Network to Boost RWA Capabilities

Stablecoin issuer Circle expanded native issuance of its $26 billion stablecoin USDC to the Celo network, the Celo Foundations announced Tuesday in a press release.

With the development, the Celo ecosystem looks to boost cross-border payments and peer-to-peer transactions in developing regions, facilitating conversion from local currencies, the press release explained.

CLabs, an organization dedicated to Celo ecosystem development, will also propose a community vote to enable paying transaction fees (gas) with USDC stablecoin.

The USDC expansion came as Celo increasingly vying to be an important plumbing for tokenized real-world assets (RWA) — placing traditional investments such as bonds and credit on blockchains in a token form and use stablecoins for settlements. RWA-focused marketplace Untangled Finance and credit platform Huma expanded to the network in the past months.

“The Celo ecosystem is excited to bring more RWAs on-chain through our partnership with Circle and the launch of USDC on Celo,” Isha Varshney, head of strategy and innovation at the Celo Foundation, said in a statement. “We want to be the best ecosystem for stablecoins, which has proven to be among the industry’s prevailing use cases, as institutional investors come into Web3.”

Celo is currently in the process of ditching its standalone blockchain and migrating to become an Ethereum-based layer 2 network.