CENTRE is the open source technology project which was launched by the founding members at Circle and Coinbase. Their debut offering is USDC, which is the world’s 2nd largest stable coin.

On August 27, 2020 CENTRE tweeted:  “USDC 2.0 is being released today bringing “gasless sends,” improved security and administration. And it’s 100% backward compatible. Today’s release comes as USDC market cap hits 1.4 billion!”

This update has provided the additional security infrastructure to the USDC smart contract. USDC is hailed to be the fastest-growing regulated stable coin.  USDC has enjoyed unprecedented adoption and it has crossed more than $1.4 billion in terms of market capitalization and there are more than $90 billion in on-chain transaction volume.

Of note, the USDC transactions on the Ethereum Network attracts transaction costs known as “Gas Fees.” The gas fees has been a major hurdle to adoption and this led to less than expected usage of digital dollar stable coins for payments made in the internet.  And, importantly, several digital wallets need users to buy and hold a balance of ether (ETH) in order to pay for the gas fees.

However, with the coming of USDC 2.0 the concept of “gasless sends” has been introduced.  This concept introduces the wallet and app developers to travel away from the complexity of the gas fees.  Thus, the customer is not forced to hold a balance of Ether.  The payment of the gas fees is not delegated to another address.

Therefore, now the developers will be able to pay the gas fees themselves or they will be permitting third party services to pay the concerned fees.  This developers will be able to pay the fees instead of the customers paying it or they will be able to deduct the fees in USDC.

Sydney Ifergan, the crypto expert tweeted: “USDC 2.0 is a sign that user difficulties like increased cost should be addressed to improve on mass adoption.”

USDC 2.0 New Consensus Mechanisms

USDC 2.0 have come up with a new set of on-chain multiple-signature contracts.  The new consensus mechanisms will make it possible to shift the off-line human processes into the on-chain multiple signature processes.

Thus, administrative operations will be manageable on-chain when compared to the old manual off-chain processes. Therefore, the security, auditability and resilience of USDC stays improved. They are set to use the M-of-N multiple signature model, and therefore, more members including the issuing members will be participating in the operational flows in the on-chain tasks.

There is an elaborate video about this development online and there are lot of beginner guides for those who are just getting to know USDC.  The money movement video is worth the watch as Jeremy, Joao and Nemil talk about USDC 2.0.