ckUSDC on and off ramp fees

Developers
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We are building a cross-border payment solution and want to develop on ICP. Payments are in USDC. However, we deal with micro-transactions involving unbanked people around the world. Our users need to off-ramp to local currencies. Unfortunately, the Eth fees of converting ckUSDC to and from native USDC seem to immediately disqualify ICP. It doesn’t make sense to pay $5 in Eth tx fees to off ramp $5 ckUSDC.

What am I missing here? It seems crazy that ERC USDC is the only option. Does anyone know if native USDC is planned on ICP in 2025? It seems Dfininty is for whatever reason against it and convinced that ckUSDC is enough. But clearly it’s not enough for real world use cases.

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We’ve been trying to get native USDC or USDT for at least two years. But it takes two to tango :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

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Interesting. Thanks for that. So there is resistance from Circle. Is the problem technical or something else?

We are a small fish, but will encourage Circle to tango based on our use case. If you have any advice or specific contacts at Circle for us to nudge please don’t hesitate to share.

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This is not my specialty so I’m not sure how much I can help. Here’s what I got out of one of the people that have been talking to Circle before:

companies like Circle look at the full business case potential, and then the cost of any chain integration is going to be tiny compared to the potential revenue that large and successful blockchains provide.
Key metrics they look at are 1. on-chain activity, such as TVL or even native stablecoins, and 2. number of wallets holding economically relevant amount of assets, e.g. >$10

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Thanks. They should widen their metrics and look at cycle burn rates and dev activity. I’m in touch with their sales team to try and push things along…not optimistic but worth a try

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You should follow USD-pegged stablecoin: USDG | Gold DAO knowledge hub
Native usd stable coin will come soon on dfinity with low fees :slight_smile:

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If you wait a couple of week there will be no need for USDC, you can have FXMX, redeem in 3 days anywhere globally in any local currency. FXMX offers the ICP ecosystem access to institutional grade investment products with an ApY that gives yield daily. Developed by Mercatura Forum, the leading web3 venture studio in Northern Africa. By emerging markets for emerging markets.

Here is a sneak peak from some of our partners

image
image1170×1645 429 KB

https://x.com/mercx__?s=21&t=ZbNb94M7k9y5EWO4fsxEOg

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Given the current situation with Eth fees, wouldn’t it make more sense to implement a stablecoin solution using networks like Algorand or Solana that have significantly lower transaction costs?

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It depends on what you care about and what mechanisms you use. Here’s a selection of things to consider:

  • Trust in the underlying thing: Arguably better for ETH
  • How easy is it to sell the underlying asset?
  • How often will people want to wrap/unwrap?
  • How fast can you wrap/unwrap?
  • How stable is communication with the target chain?
  • How much will people wrap/unwrap at a time? $1 vs $10 doesn’t matter on a transfer of a bajillion tokens
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I’m in touch with Circle. They want to know if ICP has the bridged standard for USDC deployed. Is it deployed? Doing my best to push them towards making this happen

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Interesting. Our clients require Mica compliant stable coins. Will that be the case with USDG?

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The IC isn’t an evm chain, so we can’t just deploy the bridge contract from Circle directly.

There’s the ckUSDC canister that bridges native USDC on ETH to the IC through chain key technology (no trusted single bridge entity).

Related ongoing Tokenization WG topic around ledger standard(s) needed for stable coin issuers on the IC: New Standards for Managing Real-World Asset and Stablecoin Ledgers

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Stellar, SUI, Near, dunno about volume… but I think NNS is a key factor. Not enough decentralization/stake in NNS. Would be interesting to know how much stake Circle has in chains listed compared to ICP.

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Doesnt Bitfinity EVM allow running EVM in a canister? Or am I mistaken what bitfinoty evm is

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I’m personally not up to date about latest developments regarding Bitfinity, but if I remember correctly it does implement an EVM within a canister.

Though in this particular case, this approach might not make sense since it wouldn’t result in a native ICRC token on the IC and there would be an unnecessary EVM overhead.

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