According to CryptoPotato, stablecoin issuer and fintech firm Circle has announced the launch of a new v2.2 upgrade to USDC and EURC. The upgrade aims to significantly reduce gas costs, improve support for account abstraction, and further strengthen transaction security on EVM blockchains. The phased rollout is expected to be completed over the next few months. The USDC and EURC smart contracts will undergo six modifications, all incorporated in a unified v2.2 upgrade for each supported EVM blockchain. This upgrade is fully backward-compatible, introducing no breaking changes to existing integrations. The upgrade has been audited by Halborn, a prominent third-party blockchain security firm.
Six new changes to USDC and EURC smart contracts include enabling signature validation from smart contract wallets, enhancing blocklisting check efficiency, enhancing resilience against forks, removing the blocklist check from functions that don’t move funds, skipping the timestamp check when the deadline is set to the maximum amount, and a one-time rename for the EURC token symbol. Developers will be able to create products enabling users to pay network gas fees using USDC and EURC, according to the official announcement. The optimization results in a 6-7% cost reduction for common use cases, such as transfers or trades, and a 3-4% decrease in network gas fees for developers and users of the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) when burning and minting USDC across blockchains.
Circle is reportedly exploring the possibility of becoming a publicly traded company in the early months of 2024. Although there’s no official confirmation, CEO Jeremy Allaire previously expressed the intention to become a publicly traded entity shortly after a failed SPAC deal with Concord last year.
