The Ethereum blockchain’s September 2022 upgrade from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a more environmentally-sustainable Proof-of-Stake (PoS) infrastructure was a major milestone in Ethereum’s growth and scaling roadmap. As announced following this event, known as “The Merge,” the Centre Consortium and its members, Circle and Coinbase, exclusively support the Ethereum PoS blockchain for USDC. We have since taken proactive steps to address an unsupported smart contract that resulted from a hard fork, in which the Ethereum blockchain split into two different networks: the PoS and PoW chains. 

Centre, Circle and Coinbase have relinquished administrative control of the unsupported smart contract that was “USD Coin” in name only on the Ethereum PoW chain. We have also removed the name “USD Coin” from the token on the ETH PoW chain. In advance of deployment, these code changes were confirmed by a third-party cybersecurity firm.

We look forward to USDC’s continued stability and global scale now that the Merge is complete. Again, Centre, Circle and Coinbase exclusively support USDC on the Ethereum PoS chain. We encourage customers and platform users to always be vigilant for bad actors’ scams and phishing attempts that encourage them to interact with unsupported assets on the ETH PoW chain.