USDC is issued by two Circle legal entities, and the parent company is listed on an exchange and reports to the SEC. In Europe the issuance runs under a French electronic money institution licence obtained under the MiCA rules.
What backs it and what exactly gets published
Circle discloses the composition of the reserve weekly, and once a month an independent audit firm confirms that the value of the reserve is not less than the issued volume. The report as of 31 July 2026: 71,826,453,410 USDC in circulation against a reserve of $71,904,101,332.
About 84% of the reserve is held in a government money fund managed by an outside company, the rest is short-term bills and money in bank accounts. It is worth understanding: this is an attestation that the reserve was sufficient on the reporting dates, not a check of the company's entire accounts — the annual audit goes separately, inside the report to the SEC.
The TRON network: no minting, but the contract is alive
Circle stopped issuing USDC on TRON on 21 February 2024, and the network appears neither in the list of 38 blockchains on the issuer's site nor in its developer documentation. But the contract works: as of 19 September 2026 the supply stands at 27.9 million USDC, the pause is not switched on, and transfers were going through that same day.
Two of Circle's own primary sources contradict each other here, and that is worth saying plainly. In the auditor-attested reserve report TRON is listed among the approved networks — with the caveat that only redemption is supported. In the public lists of networks it is absent. Writing “USDC does not exist on TRON” is wrong, but there is no reason to accept it there either: there is no issuance, and the way back runs through an outside service.
Can USDC be frozen
It can. The contract has the functions blacklist, unBlacklist and pause — checked against the bytecode on 19 September 2026. Circle has a figure of its own too: as of 31 July 2026, 129,764,354 USDC are recorded as unavailable to their holders, and from report to report it grows.
There is one difference from USDT, and it is a real one: the USDC contract has no function for destroying the funds of a blocked address — a blocked wallet stops moving tokens, but the tokens themselves stay on it. The caveat is obligatory: USDC is built as an upgradeable proxy and USDT is not. The difference lies not in the issuer's powers but in the fact that Circle would first have to upgrade the contract.
The text of Circle's own blocking policy, meanwhile, does not exist: the user terms refer to it, but the document is nowhere to be found on the site. This gap is worth stating plainly — the rules by which an address ends up on the list cannot be checked by the reader.
What a transfer costs on the Ethereum network
Cents. On 19 September 2026 an ordinary USDC transfer spent about 40,360 units of gas, and the first receipt of USDC at an address about 62,248: at the gas price of that day this is 3–5 cents and 5–8 cents respectively.
The figure lives only together with the date of the measurement. The gas price changes several times over within a day, and a month of history could not be collected — free nodes hand over only the last few hours. This is a slice of one day, not an average.