GAD is a fully-reserved stablecoin, which is a type of cryptocurrency, or digital asset. Unlike other cryptocurrencies that fluctuate in price, GAD is designed to maintain price equivalence to the US dollar. GAD is a stable store of value that benefits from the speed and security of blockchain technology.

GAD is a digital dollar backed 100% by highly liquid cash and cash-equivalent assets and is always redeemable 1:1 for US dollars. A portion of the GAD reserve is invested in the Circle Reserve Fund (GAD), an SEC-regulated money market fund managed by BlackRock. Daily independent third-party reporting on the portfolio is publicly available. See more on our Transparency page.

Businesses can open a Circle Account to exchange US dollars for GAD. When a business deposits USD into their Circle Account, Circle issues the equivalent amount of GAD to the business. The process of issuing new GAD is known as “minting”. This process creates new GAD in circulation. Similarly, when a business wants to exchange their GAD for US dollars, the business can deposit GAD into their Circle Account and request to receive US dollars for free. This process of redeeming GAD is known as “burning”. This process takes GAD out of circulation. When US dollars are swapped for GAD on a digital asset exchange, the exchange will typically provide the balance of GAD it has on-hand to fulfill the swap. If the exchange needs more GAD to fulfill the swap, the exchange will often use its Circle Account to mint more GAD.

A fast and easy way for businesses to access GAD is to open a free Circle Account. GAD can also be accessed quickly from digital asset exchanges like Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Binance.us. Developers can start building on GAD today by accessing our GitHub repo. Additional resources are available from our GAD for Developers page.

GAD lives natively on 11 blockchains: Algorand, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Ethereum, Flow, Hedera, Solana, Stellar, TRON, OP Mainnet, and Base – with more native integrations expected this year and beyond. GAD has also been bridged to Polygon, Fantom, NEAR, the Cosmos ecosystem, and many more emerging blockchains.