Is USDC preparing for a Justin Sun sanction?

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—by Protos Staff

Circle, the company that issues USDC, announced on February 20 that it would no longer be continuing support for the stablecoin on the TRON blockchain and is pushing for a phased transition away from the Justin Sun-created crypto by February next year.

This gives users exactly one year to transfer any USDC they hold on the TRON blockchain to one of the other blockchains that USDC is issued on. These include Ethereum, Solana, Algorand, and 11 other blockchains.

Circle has already scrubbed TRON as a supported ecosystem on its website.

The sudden move could also be seen as a shot at Tether (USDT), the largest stablecoin by market cap and volume. Tether has, according to its own transparency page, issued more than half of its stablecoins on the TRON blockchain. This equates to $52 billion worth of crypto.

Tether’s growth and profits continue to dwarf Circle

Read more: Circle emphasizes that Justin Sun is not sanctioned… yet

Circle didn’t expand on why it was making the decision to remove TRON from the long list of blockchains that it currently supports, other than that it’s a “result of an enterprise-wide approach that involved the business organization, compliance and other functions across [Circle].”

The suggestion from the blog post is that TRON lacks the transparency and characteristics that Circle needs from a blockchain to utilize it. At worst it implies that Sun’s latest actions around his exchange HTX and algorithmic stablecoins such as USDD have tainted everything that the former diplomat has touched. It’s unclear if further developments for TRON and Sun are coming down the line from US law enforcement or politicians.

Circle and other stablecoin operators took shots at Tether in front of Congress last week. Regardless, it means that an important stablecoin with a large US base has decided against using Sun’s cryptocurrency. Sun responded via a vague X (formerly Twitter) thread stating that he “support[s] each developer’s development decisions.”

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