Circle’s Payments Platform Now Supports Polygon USDC Transactions

Circle will be supporting Polygon USDC on its payments and treasury platform, allowing for more easily automated flows from fiat into the Polygon coin, according to a press release emailed to PYMNTS Tuesday (June 7).

This is a key part of a lot of newer decentralized finance (DeFi), payments and non-fungible token (NFT) application use cases.

The release said support from Circle gives more businesses, exchanges and institutional traders faster and easier access to Polygon UDSC — including a way to swap it for native USDC on eight other blockchain networks.

Polygon is the first “bridged” USDC to get Circle’s support, per the release. The Circle Account will help to abstract away the costly and time-consuming process of bridging USDC from Ethereum to Polygon manually over the Polygon Bridge.

The release said this will help businesses and developers use Circle’s platform to accept payments in Polygon USDC. They’ll be able to make global payouts and work with customers’ accounts infrastructure, and institutional traders can automate access to Polygon USDC by using a Circle Account for their crypto capital markets.

“Polygon is an attractive entry point for businesses and developers to build in an established and liquid ecosystem with faster settlement times and reduced costs,” said Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle. “Supporting Polygon USDC in the Circle Account and Circle APIs is another step toward making USDC interoperable across more leading blockchains, helping foster greater adoption for dollar digital currency on the internet.”

Circle recently came out against the idea of a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC), though, saying it would “destabilize” banking.

Read more: Circle Tells Federal Reserve a CBDC ‘Could Destabilize’ Banking

The company said that a CBDC could make for “potential domestic flight-to-quality or flight-to-safety problems which could destabilize the two-tiered banking system.”

This was in response to a Federal Reserve paper in which the central bank was pondering the uses of a CBDC, though it did not take any stance at the time. Circle said there would need to be a national framework, heavily overseen, to issue and deal with a CBDC if one came to be.