Centre Consortium, in collaboration with Coinbase and Circle, has launched a new version of the popular USDC dollar-linked stablecoin. The launch is slated today. The objective of the USDC 2.0 is to deal with high gas fees, which are charges payable on the Ethereum network for USDC transactions. As against the present system, developers will now have the option to hand out the fees to other wallets or receive the fees in USDC.
An official announcement explains that users currently have to mandatorily have Ether in their wallets to carry through required transactions. This fuels additional complexities and intricacies that users can do without. This issue is being addressed by the launch of the updated version of USDC. It will have “gasless sends,” which will enable wallet developers to dispense with gas fees. The payment of gas fees instead can be routed to another address and thus does away with the requirement to have a balance of ETH in the wallet.
Developers have two options – paying the fees for their clients or permitting a third-party service to pay instead. The focus of both is the same that is to remove ETH from the ecosystem. Users will be able to transact in USDC payments through USDC only with the fees being paid in USDC too. It not only simplifies the procedure but also reduces the burden of crippling gas fees.
This move has been necessitated by the high Ethereum network fees. It was at the peak of $6.60 for over two years but has recently dropped to $2.50. According to analysts, this, too, is way beyond expected levels. The first quarter of this year was about $0.15 before rising to the present levels.
The constant high level of Ethereum network fees is powered by the DeFi boom. The transactions on Ethereum have grown exponentially and are now just short of the record of 1.13 million. According to the report of ETH Gas Station, Uniswap with $12.7 million and Tether with $10.5 million were on top of the list over the past 30 days as the largest sources of network fees generated.
The new coin comes with additional security features like a fresh set of on-chain multiple-signature contracts with new consensus mechanisms. There will be no changes to the present exchanges and apps linked to the USDC, and wallets.
USDC currently handles excess of $90 billion in an on-chain volume of transactions and has a market capitalization of $1.4 billion.
