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Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#291

Post by jessepollak »

jatsign wrote: post #133
jessepollak wrote: post #107

Hi all — head of engineering for the consumer product at Coinbase here (iOS, Android, coinbase.com). Happy to answer any questions that people have — also, just wanted to make a plug that we're hiring. If you're interested in building an open financial system for the world, shoot me a note at jpollak@coinbase.com. Especially interested in iOS & Android engineers!

Have you published the USDC contract to the network?

Yes, you can see the contract here: https://etherscan.io/address/0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb.... Thanks!

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#292

Post by jessepollak »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #159
jessepollak wrote: post #107

Hi all — head of engineering for the consumer product at Coinbase here (iOS, Android, coinbase.com). Happy to answer any questions that people have — also, just wanted to make a plug that we're hiring. If you're interested in building an open financial system for the world, shoot me a note at jpollak@coinbase.com. Especially interested in iOS & Android engineers!

Hey there Jesse. Question for you: Will Coinbase Commerce also be integrating support for USDC? Thanks!

I can't comment for them on this one, sorry!

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#293

Post by quickthrower2 »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #63

"Stablecoin" in general generates a ton of legal risk for the operators. If you can make peer-to-peer transactions with it, then the coin operators are definitely not complying with Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering laws. This will pretty reliably get the US Feds to raid your offices, seize your website and servers, arrest the principles responsible, and prosecute them. See also: Liberty Reserve. On the ot…

Also tax evasion. A semi-anonymous store of cash. You could earn some money doing a gig, then go abroad and spend it on holiday (withdraw from ATM or whatever).

You can do that with non-stable coins too, but this would be more attractive due to the predictability of it's value.

All the while Coinbase make money off the never-ending interest. And one day they may go fractional too.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#294

Post by kaffeemitsahne »

seanalltogether wrote: post #52
larrysalibra wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably they'll charge you a fee to buy, sell and trade it just like any other asset. If coinbase is involved in keeping the reserve, they can invest it various assets and keep the earnings - think money market fund, but you don't earn any interest - coinbase/circle keep the interest.

> If coinbase is involved in keeping the reserve, they can invest it various assets and keep the earnings If that's the case I wish they were up front about that fact. I think its completely reasonable that they would keep any earned interest as compensation for managing the coin, so just be honest about it.

I don't see any reason to assume they will pay interest on the USD in custody, nor do they claim to do so, which makes them 100% honest in my book.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#295

Post by QML »

chemmail wrote: post #281
mehmeta wrote: post #276

The main problem with fiat backed stablecoins is that in addition to smart contract/theoretical security, you now have to also trust the procedural security of the entity issuing the asset. A collateralized stablecoin like Maker/Dai doesn't have that additional attack vector. For example, if the keys issuing the USDC has ever been compromised, new assets can be issued instantly by an attacker, compromising fungibilit…

The problem with stablecoins, there is no such thing as a stable coin.

Whats the difference between a stablecoin and an IOU?

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#296

Post by asynchrony »

rocqua wrote: post #277
asynchrony wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point they'll want to exchange their profits for real goods and services. They will rely on some exchange service to cash out eventually.

If most of the criminal money is used to transact with other criminals, then most of the money doesn't need to convert to USD. The real kicker is whether the other criminals are willing to accept bitcoin which they know won't convert to USD.

You could certainly accept bitcoin for black market transactions and spend bitcoin on black market transactions, but wouldn't most participants want to transport their gains to the real world eventually?

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#297

Post by Entangled »

anders94 wrote: post #155

Hi, I'm Anders Brownworth, Chief Evangelist at Circle. I'm happy to answer any questions on USD Coin, CENTRE or Circle. We're also hiring! See https://circle.careers/

Why did you pick Ethereum instead of Ripple or Stellar? They have lower transaction fees and almost instant transfers in the seconds while their token contracts are way easier to setup and maintain if you are thinking on adding EUR, GBP, YEN, etc in the future. The only real advantage of Ethereum is their user base which is important but not the only decisive factor.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#298

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

stanleydrew wrote: post #91
orthecreedence wrote: post #65

Coinbase has USDC, Gemini has GUSD. Will be interesting to see how this plays out. I'm curious if adoption becomes a function of which fly-by-night exchanges start launching pairs. But then again, if the fees are low enough (if my $1 truly gets me one token, and one token gets me $0.9999 back) these tokens are going to be useful in themselves without needing to be traded on seedy exchanges. It would be great for taki…

Somewhat unrelated, but the reason micropayments aren't a thing isn't that transaction fees are too high. The reason is that consumers hate them. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...

The idea of a micropayment isn't monolithic. People certainly will not like to be nickle-and-dimed to read the news, but that's fairly obvious.

The real model here is Patreon. Patreon is (well, was) about bundling payments to make recurring micropayments practical. Their execution has issues (it's also highly successful) but the fundamental idea of recurring micropayments is totally sound. Audiences are receptive to it, and creators can legitimately support their work with this kind of aggregate payment.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#299

Post by AgentME »

hudon wrote: post #193
celticninja wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can avoid gemini and coinbase if you use bitcoin. You cannot avoid them if you use USDC/GUSD.

When you say "use bitcoin", what do you mean? edit: Perhaps the lesson here is the more useful something is, the less freedom you have in using it. After all, why would regulators care if you can "use bitcoin" when "use" means "play with my private keys".

Coinbase and Gemini aren't the only places that accept Bitcoin.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#300

Post by beaner »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #258
beaner wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That modern economics has programmed in accountability for slow, large payments doesn't mean the system wouldn't be better off if it changed.

> That modern economics has programmed in accountability for slow, large payments doesn't mean the system wouldn't be better off if it changed It's more fundamental than accounting. If a transaction costs X, aggregating N transactions into a single transaction reduces the per-transaction cost to X/N. The latter, batched process will always be slower and cheaper than the former. (If a transaction costs Y%, aggregating…

Payments are generally batched because individual payments are slow and/or have restrictions applied, like time of day they can be sent or received, which are easier to reason about when aggregated.

If you remove these burdens by having a technology that is cheap and nearly instant for all payments, then there's no real need to batch.

We're not quite at cheap + instant with crypto, but there's nothing preventing it in principle. And when we get there, there's no reason batching needs to continue to be part of the equation, at least not with the same tradeoffs.

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