Alibaba’s Ant Group Sets Its Sights on USDC—You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!

What to know:

  • Ant Group’s international arm, restless as a coyote at dusk, wants to haul Circle’s USDC stablecoin onto its own chain—if the U.S. regulators give the all-clear, of course. The regulators, meanwhile, are known to move as swift as molasses on a cold morning. 🐢
  • This is not Ant’s first foray into strange lands; they’re building a platform for digital money of every possible shape and flavor—even the future ones that your grandkids will scoff at someday.
  • Ant’s blockchain—already busier than a saloon on payday—toted up more than $300 billion last year, with no signs of slowing down, much to the chagrin of tired accountants everywhere.

The folks at Ant Group, a beast of a company known to tip its hat to Jack Ma, are dusting off room on their international blockchain for Circle’s USDC. It’s all very civilized, provided Uncle Sam’s rule-makers give their frowning nod of approval. If not, well, we wait.

The word around the campfire (with Bloomberg stoking the flames) is that operations begin once those regulators say the word—because nothing says “fast-paced tech” like a few months of bureaucratic paperwork. 🗂️

If the stars align, USDC gets a golden ticket to a payments network that juggled over a trillion dollars last year—a third of which happened on-chain, because these days even blockchains need to keep busy. If things go right and the wind’s at their back, Ant could become the biggest foreign company propping up a American stablecoin. Which, for reasons historians will ponder, is apparently something to boast about. 🏆

Ant International, never content to fish in just one pond, is also courting regulators in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Luxembourg for stablecoin licenses. They imagine a world where digital dollars, central bank coins, and bank deposits all coexist, living together under one big digital roof like a complicated family reunion.

Rumors drift in on the wind that Ant’s blockchain is already hosting an assortment of tokens from banks and even waltzing with the People’s Bank of China on the digital yuan project. If blockchain had barn dances, Ant would be leading every number. 💃

Meanwhile, back on the stock exchange frontier, Circle’s shares climbed almost 3.8% in pre-market trading, hitting $208—a clear sign that nothing gets Wall Street’s heart rate up like the mere sight of the word “blockchain.”

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2025-07-10 12:43