What is USDC? USD Coin, or USDC, is a stablecoin cryptocurrency meant to always be able to be redeemed for $1 USD. According to https://www.coinbase.com/usdc “USDC is the brainchild of CENTRE, an open source technology project bootstrapped by contributions from Circle and Coinbase.”
USDC has experienced exponential growth in its market cap the past two years. According to https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin, USDC has a current market cap of $17,772,020,414 as of May 19, 2021.
However, Coinbase’s USDC website https://www.coinbase.com/usdc/ lists the current market cap as “only” 14.4 billion dollars.
I tried reading their original whitepaper linked at https://www.coinbase.com/price/usdc, but the link https://www.centre.io/pdfs/centre-whitepaper.pdf is broken and leads to a 404 not found error.
USDC lists monthly attestation reports by Grant Thornton LLP at https://www.centre.io/usdc-transparency. I have downloaded all the reports and input the data into a publicly available google sheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y3gQciOdRS_ZGqh9XQDlPYWoN2JNLQk6t6p64LkP8LA/edit?usp=sharing
If you look at the data, you will notice a few irregularities. From the first report for October 2018 until August 2020, the reports are always dated ~15 days after the end of the month. The September 2020 report is missing. The transparency page for September links to the October 2020 report. For months following, there are large lags between the end of the month and the date of the reports. The last report available is for February 2021 and it was published 58 days after the end of the month. The March 2021 report has still not been published and March 31 was 59 days ago as of this post. You can see lag in published report date after the end of the month in chart form below.
In the time since September 2020, with little and delayed transparency, USDC has experienced tremendous growth in market cap. According to Coingecko, the current market cap is nearly $18 billion dollars, or nearly double the size since the last attestation report of $9.3 billion dollars for February 2021.
On June 16, 2020, at the request of law enforcement, $100,000 worth of USDC was blacklisted.
Sources:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x15cbde1b9bf285db50e22eeff1a7d04ea267dd94726df8ecabdb4cb6c2b590cb
The month of the missing report, September 2020, is interesting because the next month’s report for October 2020 is the first report to mention the blacklisted tokens.
So my main questions for Coinbase and Circle are:
What happened to the missing September 2020 attestation report?
Why are there long irregular delays in the release of the attestation reports since September 2020?
When will the March and April 2021 attestation reports be released? Where are they?
Where is the USDC whitepaper?
Is USDC market cap wrong on coinbase.com?
UPDATE: Thanks to the help of @BennettTomlin I’ve tracked down the missing September 2020 report which can be found at the bottom of Circle’s USDC page. Interestingly, Circle’s page is missing the November 2020 report, so you need to also look at Centre’s USDC page to get all the reports combined. I’ve also created a new google sheet with all data to date.
