From now on you can top up your balance and buy gift cards using USDC over Polygon on Bitrefill.

If you’re not interested in the story and details of how USDC or Polygon works, you can skip it all, and jump to the tutorial section below, “How to Use USDC over Polygon on Bitrefill”.

Bitrefill just added USDC over Polygon as a payment option for all our products and services. Your most trusted stablecoin is now available to send even cheaper and faster.

Since its inception, Bitrefill is always on the lookout for technologies that improve financial freedom for its customers. Stablecoins are now undoubtedly used by millions of people as it serves as a tool to transact more freely all over the world.

This means that being compatible with many stablecoins over different blockchains platforms is inevitable for companies if they want to fulfill their clients' personal and commercial needs.

Let’s understand how USDC over Polygon came to be and is one of the latest iterations of a virtual US dollar transmittable over a blockchain.

USDC Evolvement

A few months ago, Bitrefill launched support for USDC over Ethereum. Since its integration, USDC usage has been showing considerable growth. This phenomenon demonstrates, at least from Bitrefill’s point of view, that stablecoins are nowhere near disappearing from the crypto ecosystem.

The original launch article of our USDC over Ethereum integration describes what USDC is and how it originated. Long story short, USDC was born from a partnership with Coinbase and Circle. It was initially launched on the Ethereum blockchain as a native ERC-20 token but has expanded to many other blockchains, one of the latest ones being Polygon.

The USDC token's ongoing expansion to other networks is a gauge of increasing utility for crypto users.

Check out the following link to see if your favorite cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and services support USDC.

What is Polygon?

Polygon is the rebranded version of a second-layer solution called Matic that aimed to solve scalability issues for its base chain Ethereum.

While not a perfect comparison, it could be juxtaposed with what the Lightning Network aims to resolve with Bitcoin.

However, Polygon aims much higher than just being a second layer to Ethereum. It’s now an interoperable blockchain scaling framework. What this means is that developers can launch different blockchains on top of the Polygon ecosystem and as a result will be able to interact easily with each other. Ideally, this will lead to more interconnected systems and elevated financial freedom.

As we can see on the chart below taken from Polygon’s blockchain explorer, Polygon’s usage remains stable in terms of daily transactions hovering around 3 million transactions per day since the beginning of 2022 after an initial blow-up reaching 9 million transactions per day in mid-2021.

You can learn more about Polygon’s architecture, security model, and technical functionalities in this article.

So What is USDC over Polygon

In June 2022, Circle added support for USDC on Polygon for its accounts and APIs. They can now acquire or sell it directly with fiat in their Circle account. They can also swap it easily between other versions of USDC supported on other blockchains.  That makes USDC over Polygon more interoperable within the USDC ecosystem.

Supporting the bridged version of USDC over Polygon on Circle’s accounts facilitates the life for users wishing to use USDC over Polygon.  The biggest gain for users is that they don’t need to manually bridge USDC from Ethereum mainnet to the Polygon network. The said bridge is known to be slower than Ethereum's regular transactions and implies high Ethereum mainnet gas fees.

Adding USDC on Polygon in the Circle Account and Circle APIs was crucial according to Jeremy Allaire, the CEO, and Co-founder of Circle. That will strengthen the interoperability of the growing ecosystem of Polygon dApps.

At the time of writing, USDC was the biggest stablecoin in terms of market cap on the Polygon ecosystem with over 800 million dollars circulating within the system.

Conclusion

Bitrefill supporting USDC over Polygon means that all dApps users of the Polygon ecosystem now have a practical and easy way to off-ramp their USDC from the web3 world into real-life products and services. USDC over Polygon is also cheaper to transact with than USDC over Ethereum resulting in a lot of savings.

Bitrefill is the biggest e-commerce platform for crypto users in the world and it is in part because we’re basing our development on legitimate and genuine requests from our users.

We’re eager to hear from you and see what payment method we can add next to simplify your life living on crypto.

You can submit your product and payment options request here.

As always, thank you for your ongoing support.

How to Use USDC over Polygon on Bitrefill (TUTORIAL)

The good news is that you can use USDC on Bitrefill without having a Bitrefill account. Isn’t that amazing?

Here are the two ways to use USDC over Polygon on Bitrefill.

1st way: Use USDC without a Bitrefill account or a topped-up balance

You can use USDC over Polygon directly by sending it from your wallet or exchange to the address provided to you once you’re ready to pay for your basket of Bitrefill products.

Simply select the USDC Polygon option as your external payment and follow the provided instructions for the transaction. Simple as that.

2nd way: Top-up your USDC balance and pay with your USDC balance

You can also top up your balance in advance to make your purchasing process simpler and faster by following the steps below.

Step 1 -  Creating a Bitrefill account

To get started, you need to create a Bitrefill account. (If you have one, jump to step 2.)

It’s super easy, only takes a minute, and only requires an email address. Navigate to bitrefill.com, and click on the account button in the upper right-hand corner left to the shopping cart button.

You will be redirected to a new page where you need to click on <<create one here>>.

Again you will be directed to a new page. You’ll need to add an email address under your control and a password.  Confirm that you accept the terms and conditions and choose if you want to receive our newsletter and sporadic promo emails.  Next, you’ll need to go to your email and confirm the email address.

Step 2 - Logging in

Once you’ve confirmed your registration email. Login to your Bitrefill account and click on the account button in the upper right-hand corner left to the shopping cart button.

Next, click on your email address to be taken to your account page.

Step 3 - Adding Funds

Now that you’re on your account page which shows your account balances, click on the big red button that says ADD FUNDS. This will take you to the Top-Up Balance page.

From the Top-Up Balance Page, you’ll see an option to choose “from” and “to”.

Click on “from” and choose if you want to add funds with USDC Polygon.

When you add funds with USDC Polygon, you’ll need to choose which Bitrefill balance you want to add the credit to. You can choose between USD and EUR.

Once you have chosen, follow the payment instructions as provided in the app to finish topping up your balance in USDC Polygon.  Be aware that they may be some conditions regarding topping up your account.

Step 4 - Waiting for the settlement

After 20 on-chain confirmations on the Polygon network, you’ll see the amount added to your chosen Bitrefill balance, and you’re ready to make a purchase. This can take anywhere from one to a few minutes.

Now that you’ve added funds to your Bitrefill account, you’re ready to shop for more than 5000 gift cards, bill payments, and mobile refill products in 180+ countries. Enjoy everything we have to offer, as the world’s largest crypto store. If you have additional questions, don’t hesitate to contact our support team.

Get started today by following this link!