USDC on Cardano via a bridge with Ethereum

usdc cardano

Cardano enthusiasts can now use USDC natively on their preferred Proof of Stake blockchain, this thanks to the iagon bridge between Cardano and Ethereum, facilitated by the Milkomeda EVM-compatible sidechain.

USDC lands on Cardano thanks to iagon and Milkomeda

Iagon takes advantage of Milkomeda’s compatibility with EVM to bring USDC to Cardano

Development continues unabated for the Proof of Stake blockchain founded by Charles Hoskinson, with the latest news coming from the interoperability side of things.

Milkomeda is an EVM-compatible protocol that allows wrapping ADA to issue milkADA on its sidechain. In a way, it’s reminiscent of Polygon’s relationship with Ethereum. 

This essentially means that ADA can be sent from Cardano using the Nami or Flint wallets to a MetaMask wallet, this locks the ADA in a smart contract and users receive milkADA allowing them to interact with the nascent DeFi on Milkomeda, which includes MuesliSwap, Milkyswap and Blueshift.

As far as iagon’s involvement goes, it was them specifically who created this bridge powered by Milkomeda and Nomad. They also announced they will bridge other ERC-20 tokens such as USDT, CARDS, GERO and C3.

We got in touch with the iagon team to ask them some questions:

Hi there, can you introduce iagon and tell us more about this bridge with Ethereum?

“Iagon is a shared storage economy that bridges decentralization and compliance for Web 3.0. Our team believes that our Token Bridge solution powered by Milkomeda & Nomad contributes to Cardano ecosystem development & growth as a whole. It’s not our core product, but our goal was to help users with an easy way to bridge their assets from Ethereum to Cardano and push its adoption.”

You’re also running an ISPO (Initial Stake Pool Offering) on Cardano, how does it work?

“We launched our ISPO on April 19th, 2022, with pool ticker IAG1 and a conversion rate of 0.02 $IAG per 1 ADA staked. Also, we are involved in Genius X’s ISPO with the GENS2 pool and 50/50 rewards. It’s still an early stage of it, but the interest from the community is high, so we plan some more engaging activities to reward them in addition to our 3M bonus rewards for early stakers.”

Unstable stablecoins

Stablecoins have been the talk of the town in recent times, primarily due to the Terra and UST debacle. The crypto world is learning the hard way that a stable asset is not an easy task. During the de-pegging of UST, also Tether’s USDT had seen a slight depeg to $0.95 on some exchanges, probably caused by the current fear surrounding these types of crypto assets.

These fluctuations have led many to switch stablecoins, with USDC leading the migration. 

USD Coin (USDC) is issued by Centre, the consortium founded by Circle and Coinbase.

Moreover, the Cardano community is eagerly waiting for DJED, an algorithmic stablecoin issued on Cardano thanks to the involvement of Coti, another crypto project which uses the DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) technology as opposed to the classical blockchain.

It remains to be seen whether Djed will give new hope for algorithmic stablecoins following UST’s collapse, or whether this idea is just good on paper.

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