The market capitalization of the USDC stablecoin, which was created by the open-source technology project founded by Coinbase and Circle, the CENTRE Consortium, has surpassed $600 million.

According to available data on the stablecoin, earlier this month there were around 445 million USDC tokens in circulation, but the number of tokens jumped to over $600 million on March 12, shortly after the price of bitcoin dropped from around $7,300 to a $3,800 low in a two-day period.

The market cap of USDC jumped to surpass the $500 million mark on March 13, and kept on rising to surpass $600 million on March 16. At press time, there are over 624 million USDC tokens in circulation.

The stablecoin was launched in 2018 and has since then been seeing its market share steadily climb, to the point it became the second-largest stablecoin by market cap, behind Tether’s USDt, of which there are over 5 billion tokens.

Millions of stablecoins were minted after the cryptocurrency market meltdown, presumably as investors moved to cryptocurrencies pegged to the U.S. dollar, and as some bought-in to take advantage of the price drops. In a blog post Coinbase touts the USDC token can be used to send and receive funds, to facilitate transactions in decentralized applications and exchanges, and as a “programmable dollar.” The blog post reads:

In recent volatile market conditions, we’re also seeing more and more consumers and institutions turn to USDC as a trusted means to weather the turbulence.

It adds that each USDC token is backed by one U.S. dollar held in an established U.S. bank, with its reserve balances being attested to by top-five accounting services firm Grant Thornton. USDC’s market cap likely also went up after Maker added it as collateral to improve DAI borrowing.

Maker’s move was voted on by MKR token holders, and will see USDC become the third cryptoasset that can be used to open Maker Vaults and generate the DAI stablecoin, along with Ethereum’s ether and Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT).

Featured image via Pixabay.