Vietnamese crypto remittance platform Cash2VN has launched support for the USD-backed stablecoin USDC.
Cash2VN was launched in 2015 as a service by Vietnam’s oldest Bitcoin exchange BitcoinVN in order to facilitate fast & simple transfers to Vietnam via the modern tools of cryptocurrency.
USDC is issued by regulated financial institutions, and backed by fully reserved assets, and redeemable on a 1:1 basis for US dollars. USDC is governed by Centre, a membership-based consortium which was established as a cooperation between two of North America’s leading cryptocurrency exchange & OTC platforms, Coinbase & Circle.
Bao Phuong Nguyen, who heads one of Vietnam’s leading OTC desks at BitcoinVN:
“While up until about half a year ago USDT was completely dominating the USD-stablecoin market in South East Asia; we started to notice some uptick in traction and demand for USDC since a few months.
While in terms of volume still far behind USDT for the time being, USDC has at this point established itself as solid number 2 in the marketplace with demand and volume increasing steadily over the past couple of months.”
These observations from one of the country’s leading OTC desks are coherent with the rapidly expanding amount of USDC in circulation (as visible in the chart above).
One of the major challenges ahead for USDC (and other ERC20-based stablecoins) remains the rapidly rising transaction costs on the Ethereum network.
Cash2VN Creator Alex Winter:
“Especially for a service like ours where cheap and fast transfers of value across borders are of high importance, the behaviour of the Ethereum network seems long-term not viable for these types of use cases.
Our service is already able to process SLP-based USDT transactions with basically no transaction fees and it would be quite simple for us to add an USDC_SLP version to our service.”
USDC is planning to tackle this issue by rolling out its stablecoin on additional Blockchain implementations over the course of 2021.
