Coinbase and Circle have joined forces to co-found the CENTRE Consortium. Learn more about what this means for the future of digital money.
Circle and Coinbase have co-founded the CENTRE Consortium in 2018, a joint venture aimed at establishing a standard for fiat on the internet and providing a governance framework and network for the global, mainstream adoption of fiat stablecoins.
Coinbase and Circle share a common vision of an open global financial system built on crypto rails and blockchain infrastructure, and realizing this vision requires industry leaders to collaborate to build interoperable protocols and standards. CENTRE was formed to establish these standards and to build the technology needed for fiat to work over the open internet.
The first major initiative from CENTRE is USD Coin, a stablecoin technology and network scheme. Circle became the first issuer of USDC just weeks ago and with this announcement, Coinbase is making it available to customers on Coinbase Pro and Coinbase.com. Customers can tokenize dollars into USDC and redeem USDC into dollars through both Circle and Coinbase, making USD Coin the industry’s first open, fungible and interoperable fiat stablecoin.
In its first few weeks, USD Coin has already gained broad industry support from more than 40 companies including wallets, exchanges, custodians, dApps and other leading firms who are helping to build a new open global financial system.
Asset-backed stablecoins provide critical infrastructure needed to build an open financial system: A price-stable medium of exchange and a token that can be employed in a wide range of smart contracts and decentralized financial protocols. They hold the promise of interoperable global payments for everyone on the planet and they help unlock the incredible power of smart contracts for tokenizing a wide range of assets and economic arrangements. We’re excited to see the ecosystem continue to grow around the USDC standard.
As a membership-based consortium and open standards effort, CENTRE welcomes broad industry participation. In the coming months, CENTRE intends to introduce more issuers onto the network and publish formal membership guidelines as well as details on CENTRE’s technical roadmap. More details on the CENTRE Consortium can be found on CENTRE.io.
Coming together as industry leaders to help define open standards helps us all build a larger and more vibrant ecosystem that creates network effects for everyone, which will ultimately deliver unparalleled value to people around the world. We are thrilled to found this initiative together and excited to continue collaborating to deliver our shared vision of an open global financial system.
Jeremy & Sean
