Circle, a peer-to-peer technology that enables payments in cryptocurrency and San Fransisco based exchange Coinbase announced that they have upgraded the USDC stablecoin protocol and its smart contract. 

Both Circle and Coinbase are members of the Centre Consortium that manages USDC. Together, the firms aimed to make the payment process easy for people who use this stablecoin. 

The idea behind the upgrade was to make payments resemble the payment services offered by existing mobile payment apps. It will allow customers to send and receive USDC and also pay transaction fees in the USDC stablecoin. 

On more technical terms this means that the update will allow gasless sends. On the other hand, this feature will allow entities that offer the USDC payment option to pay gas on behalf of their users. 

Another intention behind the update was to offer developers a choice to provide the transaction fee themselves or allow a third party service to pay the fees. The blog stated: 

Developers can either pay the fees on behalf of the customer or present and deduct the fees in USDC. 

According to the Centre Consortium blog the ‘USDC 2.0’ upgrade will also address security features in the USDC smart contracts. On the technical front, the new version of the USDC coin will introduce a new set of on-chain multiple-signature contracts. This means that the feature will include a new consensus mechanism that will mainly address security concerns. 

At press time, the USDC stablecoin in circulation was 1.4 billion.