Circle, the company behind US dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC, released its sixth audit report, which was signed by the leading auditor firm Grant Thornton. According to the “attestation report”, Goldman-funded startup has enough capital to support each token on a 1:1 basis.
The report, published today, shows that 246,586,876 USDC tokens have been issued and are still outstanding as of March 31, 2019. Meanwhile, $246,590 7,714 deposits were held by the company. Circle’s assets had an excess of $3838 in fiat reserve, according to the firm.
Compared to previous reports, the figure nearly doubled from $127 million in November 2018 but was down 21 percent from $307 million reported earlier in January’s report.
The lack of a clear audit of reserves in the crypto ecosystem has caused much discussion and controversy, particularly with regards to so-called stablecoins since they effectively act as a custodian for exchanges that are not provided traditional banking services.
Tether admits to its dominance
Circle’s initiative has also been a success in obtaining an accounting firm that can be held responsible by third parties for financial information required to audit a crypto token. The move is important due to nagging questions around Tether’s major stablecoin, which has been dogged by speculation that it holds insufficient capital to support its over $2.6 billion market cap of USDT.
USDC has increased its share of total stablecoin supply to almost 10 percent. These gains are due to Tether’s surrender of its dominance over other options such as Circle’s coin, Paxos Standard and the Gemini Dollar. The most controversial cryptocurrency saw its market share falling to below 70 percent in March, compared with over 95 percent earlier in December 2018. The coin held control of the entire stablecoin ecosystem at the start of 2018.
Coinbase Pro, which allows you to convert fiat currency to crypto for free on its institutional platform, Coinbase Pro has also helped to boost USDC dominance.
