Native USDC on Unichain and the importance of liquidity

GM, my name is Elton, Developer Relations Lead for APAC at Circle. Today I'll be sharing about Circle, more specifically the Circle platform, and what this actually means for Unichain. So, exciting news today, very excited to share on behalf of Circle that native USDC is coming to Unichain soon. What this means is that this version of USDC is fully backed by reserve, it undergoes very rigorous audits and security checks, so you can rest assured knowing that this native USDC is secure and compliant. Not just that, the full circle platform will also be coming soon to Unichain, from programmable wallets smart contract platform to also the cross-chain transfer protocol CDCTP.

So I guess most of you here would be familiar with USDC. If you do not know, USDC is the world's largest regulated digital dollar, aka stablecoin. And what this does is it provides you, everyone else, a stable store of value. Especially even if you don't need a bank account, you get access to those digital dollars. With these digital dollars, you also get to do cross-border payments, moving this money across borders, you know, 24-7, low cost, near instant settlement.

And last but not least, access to capital markets like Uniswap, right, trading financial services. So some of the problem that obviously the world faces, dollar access in regions like LATAM, MENA, APEC, where there is currency devaluation, The current solution is, well, when residents want to seek a secure form of storage of these digital dollars, they go to informal market like exchanges, sometimes even storing this money in mattresses, which obviously is not sustainable, and this is where USDC comes into the picture to solve this issue. It offers everyone this secure store of digital money, and not just that, you are able to spend these digital dollars across millions of merchants around the world. Oh, there's a screen. So another problem that the world faces is cross-border payments.

Well, it's a $120 trillion market, of which is $630 billion in remittance market. And the current solution that you guys may know would be Swift. It moves money a bit too slow, three to five days. Banks takes a cut, takes a delay, and it's not very favorable. So that's why USDC comes into the picture, to kind of provide you that low cost, 24 by 7 by 365, near instant settlement, doesn't sleep on weekends, he works every day.

Okay, so some of the highlights, this is a recent grantee, Rosen, it's basically a social metaverse and what it does is solve the problem of cross-border payments and it uses not just USDC but also our Circle platform, more specifically the programmable wallets of which I will go through later. And yeah, super cool. A second project I want to go through is NomNomPay, which is basically an AI-powered social app built on top of Telegram, trying to give you that global access to money and they use quite a lot of our Circle platform tools, not just USDC. They also use our programmable wallets, smart contract platform, CCTV, and also our research paper, transact to transaction, LLM protocol. And for example, if you want to, how this works, if you see in the screenshot here, is if you want to move, like for example, send a hundred Thai baht from Alice to Bob, what it does under the hood is that this Thai baht converts into USDC and sends to the map address of the Telegram username.

So it gives this very seamless user experience for the users, it abstracts away the blockchain complexities and it also gives all the benefits to the users. So this actually we found them in EVE Global Singapore just on the wake of Token 2049 in Singapore. So very cool, just added into the slide. So I talked a lot about the Circle platform. What exactly is the Circle platform?

Well, the Circle platform offers you this open full-stack platform to build enterprise-grade applications. We are live on many, many chains, soon Unichain. And the very first product I want to deep dive into is programmable wallets. So programmable wallets is basically this highly flexible, highly dynamic, highly scalable embedded wallet you can embed into any application. You can choose a different kind of key ownerships, be it the developer control or the user control, as the name suggests.

The ownership lies to the developer and the user, respectively. It's familiar tooling, so you just use APIs or SDK, you are able to spin up a wallet. We have multiple blockchain support. It's blockchain agnostic, so it's both EVM and non-EVM compatible. Advanced security, we use MPC, multi-party computation.

We also have a gas station that allows you to abstract away gas fees for your users so they can have a very seamless user experience. And not just that, we also have the UI console, which you are able to monitor everything, check the usage metrics, transactions, and see if there's any other issues. Very, very cool. Programable wallets, not just that. We have this highly customizable.

You just need one set of API. As you can see, we even have this thing that we are pioneering called Modular Wallet, which is coming soon. We are pioneering along with Ethereum Foundation, Alchemy, QuantStamp, and it's on this standard called ERC6900. What it does is basically very composable smart contracts allow you to build wallets for very specific innovative use cases. So if you really want to push the boundaries of blockchain and creating a very cool wallet for your very unique use case, I'm doing a workshop on our flagship event on this Wednesday, so you can come and check it out.

And I talked about programmable wallets being very highly scalable, right? Because we have a lot of features that we add into this wallet, one of which is Compliance Engine. It allows you to stay compliant, especially for businesses in their various jurisdictions who want to stay compliant, make them happy. Well, Compliance Engine is the feature for that. We have many cool features in the pipeline, one of which in beta is transaction screening and travel rule, which is in early access.

So transaction screening allows you to automate real time checks to all those different entities, addresses, and also make those automatic actions to be taken against them if they fulfill a certain criteria. So for example, you can set the different risk scores from low to high, different categories. You can set a risk type. And if it falls under that category, you can, for example, block that transaction, or you can set the different alerts. And the alerts, well, it's very easy.

You also can monitor all inside the UI console itself. The second feature that I want to talk about, last but not least, the second feature I want to talk about of the programmable wallets is the gas station. I talked about how it abstracts away the gas fees. For the end users, well, it provides that frictionless, gasless experience for your users. So especially when you create a debt, and when a user has a wallet, they often need to have the native gas fee to perform any transaction, and that kind of impacts the user experience.

So having that gas station allows your users to not need any crypto and also get the benefit, all the good stuff that your app has to offer for the users. It's quick setup for developers. You just have this API SDK kit, very familiar tooling, and we also have automation through customized policies so that you don't overcompensate, don't over-sponsor the gas fees for your end users. So, for example, if you want to sponsor just 1,000 USD per day, you can, or 1,000, 2,000, and you can set a limit per transaction and even the number of transactions to sponsor per day. Highly customizable, highly configurable, and it's all fully, you have the full autonomy through these policies in the gas station.

So that's programmable wallets, you know, there's like very cool features that scales with you, both the compliance engine, the gas station, and the second part I want to talk about in this Circle platform is the smart contract platform, which I think if you guys here are experts, maybe you don't really need, but I'll go through nonetheless. So it allows you to create, deploy, manage smart contracts on the UI console. It's very helpful. You don't even need to learn Solidity. You can redeploy them.

Not just that, you can also integrate these smart contracts via the APIs, through a blockchain-agnostic APIs. So as I say, EVM and non-EVM compatible. Not just that, with pre-ordered templates, that's why you're able to just click, click, click and deploy. And you can track everything from the dashboard as well. So last but not least, the cool last tech stack I want to cover is the cross-chain transfer protocol, otherwise known as CCTP.

It allows you to move your CC in securely, safely across the various chains that we support. Right now we support eight chains, all the names are there, and basically it's a permissionless on-chain utility that allows you to move through natively. Minting and burning doesn't move through Ethereum and so on and so forth. It moves directly from one chain to another. How this works when I talk about native USDC, it means basically the USDC is minted directly onto the chain.

It doesn't get locked or unlocked. It basically burns and mints respectively from the source and destination chain. Hence, there's no honeypot, no security risk, and basically a bit more safer and more capital efficient. Unified liquidity, because we support all those different chains. So it's not siloed in one, circle by circle, one-to-one transfer.

So when you send one USDC from Ethereum to Solana, for instance, you can expect one USDC on the other end. It's many-to-many because you don't have to move through Ethereum and it's extensible, meaning it's very composable. It's basically a low-level primitive that allows you to embed, for example, chain links. CCIP uses CircleCCTP to move USDC. Fun fact.

So five more minutes. CCTP basically is a set of composable smart contracts that is also paired with Circus 34 by 7, 365 off-chain attestation service. And what this does is it provides this automated way to validate the authenticity of these transactions, very similar to how Circle Mint works. It's a low-level primitive. Like I mentioned, you can put into any applications, be it bridges, wallets, DeFi.

It's because it's at a very low-level primitive. And how this works, I mentioned very briefly before. When a user initiates a transaction from the source chain, it burns on the source chain, and Circle just monitors the event that has been emitted and it attests that the burn event has happened. So the app just takes the attestation and basically able to mint the respective amount of USDC on the destination chain, and then thereafter to the recipient's wallet address. So that's it in a nutshell.

This is a circuit platform from programmable wallets, smart contract platform, CCTP, and this is all you need to actually be like this enterprise grade app, the app on chain. So I want to end off today with a quote from Walt Disney. Don't just listen to my presentation. The only way to get started is quit talking and begin doing we have a hackathon if global Bangkok happening this weekend ten thousand dollars worth of prizes if you want to know more you can find me my clicks there raise his hand And also very cool special prizes 500 hundred dollars worth by just giving feedback so if you're gonna learn more you can find me after today's my presentation and Yeah, thank you all for your time and attention. This is my socials.