USD Coin (USDC) Exchange

USD Coin is a dollar stablecoin issued by Circle, a regulated US company that publishes monthly attestations of its reserves. Functionally it does the same job as Tether — one token, one dollar — but it is usually chosen by people and businesses who care about the issuer's reporting and jurisdiction rather than about raw trading volume.

It lives on Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon and several other chains, and Circle operates a bridge that mints and burns natively rather than wrapping. As with any stablecoin, the network you send on decides the fee and the speed, and an address on the wrong chain means a lost transfer.

Reserves are held in cash and short-term US Treasuries at regulated custodians. The one notable wobble came in March 2023, when part of the reserve sat at a bank that failed and the token traded near 88 cents for a weekend before returning to a dollar once access was restored — a useful reminder that a stablecoin's risk is its issuer's banking, not the chain.

In swaps USDC serves the same purpose as USDT and often trades against it: the pair is how people move between the two dollar tokens when they prefer one issuer's profile to the other.

Practical points for a swap. USDC exists natively on several chains and also in bridged forms, and the two are not the same token: bridged versions (often labelled USDC.e) trade separately and some services do not accept them. If the receiving side expects native USDC, a bridged transfer can arrive as something it will not credit.

Because the issuer is a regulated company, addresses can in principle be frozen at its request — this has happened to a handful of addresses tied to court orders. For ordinary transfers it changes nothing, but it is the structural difference from a coin with no issuer at all, and worth knowing when you choose between dollar tokens.