Last November, Aptos Foundation announced that Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) would launch on its layer-1 blockchain, Aptos.
Two months later, the stablecoin issuer confirmed that the cross-chain transfer protocol and native USDC are now live on the Aptos network.
Aptos Now Supports Native USDC
With this native support, financial firms and Aptos users can now use the stablecoin’s liquidity for several purposes, such as peer-to-peer payments, decentralized finance, gambling, remittances, and real-world assets. Previously, Aptos used an intermediary version of this coin, known as lzUSDC, distributed via LayerZero.
This stablecoin was bridged from Ethereum to Aptos via LayerZero’s Aptos Bridge, but Circle did not issue it. Circle’s cross-chain transmission protocol will enable transfers of the stablecoin between blockchains through interoperability providers.
Wormhole has implemented a similar cross-chain capability. Now that native support is available, bridge providers like Stargate, built on LayerZero, will work with the Aptos ecosystem to allow a transition from the bridged stablecoin to its native version.
Stargate has been responsible for IzUSDC’s growth on Aptos. However, this migration will not be completed soon. In the tweet, Circle expects Coinbase and many other leading ecosystem apps to support native USDC on Aptos soon.
According to a Wormhole announcement, Circle’s cross-chain transmission protocol on Aptos has been incorporated, enabling native USD Coin transactions in decentralized applications with “three lines of code.” Some Aptos-based protocols using this feature include Thala Labs, Echelon Market, Cellana Finance, and Meso.
This announcement coincides with a rise in the price of Aptos’ native token (APT). CoinGecko data showed that APT increased by 5.2% in the last 24 hours and traded at $7.92 at the time of writing.
Earlier this month, Circle revealed that the USDC stablecoin’s circulation surged 78% year-on-year in 2024. This growth is notable, given it is the highest compared to other stablecoins within the period under review.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Jeremy Allaire, stated that the stablecoin had started the year strongly and could overtake Tether’s USDT as the dominant stablecoin.