Circle-Backed Verona Launches verUSD to Replace USDC in Its Payments

Verona announced verUSD on September 28, timed to Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul. It is issued through Brale, backed 1:1 by dollar reserves at regulated US institutions and live on seven chains including Ethereum and Solana, per the company.

"We've been using USDC for the past 3 years, but we weren't able to get the customization that we wanted and as granular of a detail as we wanted," Anzalone said in the interview, days before launch.

The $100 million is commitments, not supply. Verona counts more than $60 million of signed revenue that will settle in verUSD. "Some of our investors have committed the other $40 million kind of on that. So that's how we kind of get to the $100 mil number," he said. Those partners include Animoca Ventures, Figment Capital, Sfermion and Arkstream.

"We're not really looking at this as like a TVL game," he said, referring to total value locked, the usual crypto yardstick.

XION renamed itself Verona in June. It runs zero-knowledge proofs that check data at its source, and the stablecoin pays out on what gets verified.

"You were on this flight and it was delayed, just something we can verify. Here's $40. And if you want to send that globally anywhere in the world, you kind of need crypto for that. Moreover, you want a stablecoin," Anzalone said.

He expects users not to notice. "It's going to look like dollars... you're going to be able to buy coffee, you're going to be able to bring it to a credit card. Like, all these things are already being done on our chain, but with USDC," he said.

The agent bet

"Is an agent gonna be able to open a bank account? Is JP Morgan gonna open an account for an agent? Probably not gonna happen, right? So how do they do that? They have a wallet," said Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, on the On The Margin podcast. He was speaking about agents generally, not verUSD.

In March, Bernstein put 30-day volume on the x402 agent payment protocol from Coinbase (COIN) at no more than $25 million, Cointelegraph reported.

"I think what we've seen already is this kind of race to own the rails and this race to own the rails has like very much outpaced the actual volume flowing through these rails," said Nitya Subramanian, founder and CEO of wallet infrastructure firm Para, on the podcast. "But like where is the agent volume?"

Why a company issues its own dollar

"It's so hard to get any new stablecoins to take off and get adoption," said Will Harborne, CEO of Rhino.fi, on the podcast.

An own-brand token keeps reserve income in-house instead of passing it to Circle (CRCL) or Tether. Brale sells that service and already issues the Glo Dollar and the peso-backed MXNe. Stripe's Bridge and the Open USD coalition backed by Visa (V) and Mastercard (MA) compete for the same clients.

Stablecoin supply is about $311 billion: Tether's USDT $183 billion, USDC $73 billion, on DefiLlama data.

Anzalone's traction claims are early ones. "One of our flagship projects launched 7 weeks ago, brought over $200,000 in revenue. Growing like a weed," he said. "We're powering brands like Uber, Nike, Amazon. I mean, on our website we have like 150 of them."

In his example, Verona verifies that a user rides with Lyft or switched to Uber, then pays out in the stablecoin. The release puts the brand count at 115+. Neither the brand list nor Verona's usage figures (70 million verified interactions, 5 million users) have been independently documented.

Circle and Coinbase on both sides

Circle's and Coinbase's venture arms are already around the deal.

• XION, pre-2023 testnet: $11 million from Circle Ventures, Animoca Brands, Multicoin, HashKey and others, per The Block
• Ero, a verUSD committer: the app from EarnOS, which raised $6 million in June from 1kx, Coinbase Ventures and Circle Ventures, per The Block; Verona separately agreed a $12.5 million, four-year investment in EarnOS
• Animoca: reverse merger with Nasdaq-listed Currenc Group suspended September 22

Verona has no listed shares; its VERONA token trades on crypto exchanges.

• USDC issuer, Verona backer: Circle (CRCL)
• x402 agent rail, Ero backer: Coinbase (COIN)
• Branded-dollar rivals: PayPal (PYPL) , Visa (V) , Mastercard (MA)
• Animoca, deal suspended: Currenc (CURR) 

Circle earns most of its revenue on reserves, and analysts are split on the stock. Here a company its own venture arm funded is moving payments off USDC.

"I think it was just a cold start problem," Harborne said of why non-dollar tokens took years to gain ground against the incumbents' edge "with liquidity, with chain coverage and with adoption on exchanges and all these other things."