Circle Launching European Stablecoin EUROC

Circle, the stablecoin giant behind USDC, has announced that they are launching a Euro-pegged stablecoin, EUROC. The new stablecoin is expected to launch June 30th 2022.

Circle’s flagship product, USDC, the US dollar-pegged stablecoin, has been increasingly considered the safest stablecoin on the market. USDC is currently the second largest stablecoin behind Tether’s shady USDT. USDT has been under fire for a while now because they refused to directly address their collateral. The company has been inconsistent with how they describe their backing, but generally the consensus is that they hold some amount of high risk Chinese paper from companies that have recently seen massive losses.

In response to the skepticism that Tether received, Circle released a series of public audits proving that USDC is fully collateralized with cash and cash equivalents. Circle has done a good job of cutting off regulatory concerns by implementing the expected restrictions on themselves. All of this has succeeded in building consumer trust, shown by the market cap of USDC vs USDT.

The USDT market cap has collapsed over the past few months from a high of $83B down to $68B, largely due to the growing concern around stablecoin kicked off by the collapse of Terra LUNA’s UST. In that time, USDC has been viewed as a source of stability, moving from $48B to $56B market cap.

The EUROC stablecoin is launching as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, and will be expanding out to other blockchains. This was the playbook that was used to launch USDC. Ethereum is the largest blockchain by transaction volume, and has the largest DeFi ecosystem.