Stablecoin issuer Circle released a new upgrade that will benefit their U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC and its Euro-pegged stablecoin EURC.
In an update on Thursday, Circle unveiled its new v2.2 upgrade that it expects will significantly reduce gas costs, improve support for account abstraction and enhance security for transactions on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible blockchains.
2/ We'd also like to thank @alex_kroeger for suggesting gas efficiency improvements and to the many external contributors who have put time and effort into helping make $USDC and $EURC the most accessible and efficient money protocols on the internet.
— Circle (@circle) November 9, 2023
The upgrade will bring six new changes to USDC and EURC smart contracts, in a way that is fully backwards-compatible and does not require any breaking changes to existing integrations.
One of the changes involves an adoption of the EIP-1271 standard which allows authorised transfers to be used from a smart contract wallet in addition to a private key wallet. This change will vastly improve the support for account abstraction – a concept that payments giants like Visa have been experimenting with to lower the high gas fees typical of transactions.
The new upgrade will also improve the efficiency of the blocklisting feature, which prevents specific addresses from sending and receiving tokens. This feature is particularly important when it comes to bad actors that are transferring illicit funds across blockchains.
It will also make the network more resilient to forks, preventing misuse of funds which could occur in the future, with the validators being automatically able to verify the official chainID to prevent USDC or EURC transactions validated on unofficial forks.
USDC is the second largest stablecoin after USDT, with a market cap of $24 billion. Earlier this week, reports emerged that Circle was in talks with advisers on a potential public listing in 2024.
