What is Circle? | The Innovation of USDC

Speaker 1: 0:00

You're listening to the sugar cane podcast, where you get all of crypto's tastiest tips. Here's your host, sheldon Trotman and Rudy Dogum.

Speaker 2: 0:11

Sheldon, we all used USDC and we know the company behind them, Circle. But what is Circle?

Speaker 1: 0:19

Yeah, so Circle is a shape that you instead of a square Circle.

Speaker 2: 0:26

No in the context of crypto context.

Speaker 1: 0:29

Circle is really just the creators of USDC, and so USDC is a stable coin. It's kind of like a US dollar representation on chain, and so it's really just being able to bring US dollars onto a blockchain, and Circle is the provider of that. They also have a really complex and new product called CCTV, which we actually do use in sugar cane. We can talk about that in a second, jullo Nice.

Speaker 2: 0:53

And, yeah, I feel like USDC has been getting a lot of recognition and use and a lot of volume lately, especially with the CCTV coming out and making it cheaper to use and virtually free to pass around between different chains. And how does that work?

Speaker 1: 1:14

Yeah, so Circle. Again, the USDC context is that it is the ability to bring assets that are like US dollars On chain right and every month I think they actually do produce like attestations, so they actually have like descriptions of how much assets they hold in a bank account, whether that's broken up into treasuries, whether that's broken up to US dollars, and they tell people that. So there's full transparency as to how much value backs every specific US dollar USDC token. So the ability to actually bring that in chains is both secure and also like representative. But more than that, as I talked about before with the CCTV, is that it allows you to move USDC from one chain to another. So again, in the context of sugar cane, when you sign up with sugar cane we have our smart contract accounts on six different chains. So again, our return, our return, polygon, optimism, base, bsc I miss one, but yeah like this is really to have a different poly, poly, anyway.

Speaker 1: 2:19

So yeah, so you can have, you see, on all these different chains, right, and we actually do move the USDC from one chain to another, depending on if you're going to different products on a different chain, and so we use circles, what's called the cross chain transfer protocol, which is CCTV, to move USDC. It's free actually. So in traditional bridges you actually do lose a little bit of value when you go through a bridge, but for going from one chain to another, they actually create, they actually burn the USDC on one chain and they minted on the other chain for you. So it's pretty seamless way to move assets.

Speaker 2: 2:54

That's awesome. That's a super friendly way of getting more users to use USDC, because, again, it's all about user experience and it sounds like circle knows what's up with that, because they're the same people that also are in collaboration with Coinbase to help make USDC a standard and legitimate token.

Speaker 1: 3:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they also do report and like how much assets they store, so like that's also a big thing to what they have.

Speaker 2: 3:21

I'm going to use your deposits, usdc to sure came, because that's the token that they want to use and they want to start staking or lending, whatever they want to do what happens in our, in our backend.

Speaker 1: 3:35

Yeah. So there's kind of two different ways to be the context, the two ways you can get assets into your sugar cane account. One is via sending USDC from whatever other address. Let's say you have a metamask and you want to send yourself assets to your sugar cane account, we actually show you the address on whatever chain you're coming from. So if it's an arbitrum, arbitrum, optimism, polygon, ethereum, mainnet base, bse we show you the address that we have your smart contract account on that chain.

Speaker 1: 4:04

But if you're coming from, like, let's say, the fiat world and you have a bank account and you want to bridge or on ramp assets to crypto, we actually do have an integration to actually make the process seamless. And we go from your bank account, you transfer it to Stripe, so we actually use Stripe if you're in the States, we have another provider if you're international and so you transfer to them. Again, all kind of hidden behind the scenes and what they. What we do is we actually mint the USDC onto a particular blockchain. Sometimes we mint it directly onto arbitrum, sometimes we mint it directly onto polygon. So you actually now have in your sugar cane smart contract wallet your USDC on that particular chain. That's easy, it's very clean. It's there, there for you to use.

Speaker 2: 4:48

That's sweet, yeah, and was it? Were there some challenges building with Circle?

Speaker 1: 4:55

Yeah, so I'd be honest, it's pretty easy, Just because, for the most part, Circle is one of the older organizations that have been in the crypto space and also one of the more trusted organizations in the crypto space, and so the actual docs are pretty straightforward. Since CCTV is fairly new, it took a bit of work to get that actual part working properly, but it's again one of the most seamless bridging solutions to go from one chain to another.

Speaker 2: 5:25

For USDC specifically, Sweet yeah, and that sounds awesome because for people who are building now and they plan to use USDC and they want to have the option between using USDC with any chain, it sounds like a sweet solution for them to use.

Speaker 1: 5:43

Yeah, yeah, because what's also kind of cool is that they can go from what's called EVM chains, so Ethereum-based chains, and all the six that I've talked about so far. Those are all Ethereum chains, but they also have integrations with Avalanche, which is another blockchain that's very different or somewhat different from the other existing L2s, and they also have a bridge to Solana, so they also can create USDC on Solana, which is also another, completely different blockchain. That's very different from all of the Ethereum-based ones or Ethereum-like blockchains.

Speaker 2: 6:15

So just let them make an expansion. Yeah yeah, they're making that user experience easy for any chain too. It's incredible. It's like this is actually what we want to build off of is companies who are providing a service that make it easy for other users, but along with builders who are trying to give a better, positive user experience for others and cheaper.

Speaker 1: 6:35

Yeah, like, yeah, as well as say like how we can actually build and focus on user experience and then work with the providers who actually focus on that particular part. So it's been really great for that and, like you know, a represent value on chain.

Speaker 2: 6:46

Nice, and if you're building on chain anyone with circle, let us know. We'd like just love to hear about it and hear your story. So stay tuned for the next product, because it's getting sweeter For sure. Thanks a lot.