USDC is a fully-reserved stablecoin, which is a type of cryptocurrency, or digital asset. Unlike other cryptocurrencies that fluctuate in price, USDC is designed to maintain price equivalence to the US dollar. USDC is a stable store of value that benefits from the speed and security of blockchain technology.

USDC is a digital dollar backed 100% by highly liquid cash and cash-equivalent assets and is always redeemable 1:1 for US dollars. A portion of the USDC reserve is invested in the Circle Reserve Fund (USDXX), an SEC-regulated money market fund managed by BlackRock. Daily independent third-party reporting on the portfolio is publicly available. See more on our Transparency page.

Businesses can open a Circle Account to exchange US dollars for USDC. When a business deposits USD into their Circle Account, Circle issues the equivalent amount of USDC to the business. The process of issuing new USDC is known as “minting”. This process creates new USDC in circulation.

Similarly, when a business wants to exchange their USDC for US dollars, the business can deposit USDC into their Circle Account and request to receive US dollars for free. This process of redeeming USDC is known as “burning”. This process takes USDC out of circulation.

When US dollars are swapped for USDC on a digital asset exchange, the exchange will typically provide the balance of USDC it has on-hand to fulfill the swap. If the exchange needs more USDC to fulfill the swap, the exchange will often use its Circle Account to mint more USDC.

A fast and easy way for businesses to access USDC is to open a free Circle Account.

USDC can also be accessed quickly from digital asset exchanges like Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Binance.us.

Developers can start building on USDC today by accessing our GitHub repo. Additional resources are available from our USDC for Developers page.

USDC lives natively on 11 blockchains: Algorand, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Ethereum, Flow, Hedera, Solana, Stellar, TRON, OP Mainnet, and Base – with more native integrations expected this year and beyond.

USDC has also been bridged to Polygon, Fantom, NEAR, the Cosmos ecosystem, and many more emerging blockchains.

For more details, check out our USDC for Developers page.