Today Coinbase and Circle announced an alliance under what they're calling the "CENTRE Consortium".  In this arrangement, Coinbase has added the first stable coin to their platform - Circle's "USD Coin" which officially launched in May of this year.

"Starting today, Coinbase customers in supported jurisdictions can buy, sell, send and receive the USD Coin stablecoin (USDC) at Coinbase.com and in the Coinbase iOS and Android apps. US customers outside New York state can buy and sell, and customers around the world can send and receive. More geographies will be available in the future." says CoinBase in a blog post.

Stable coins are intended to always be worth $1 US Dollar, and each one issued backed by $1 sitting in a bank.

The current top stable coin, Tether (USDT) is accused of not having that money in the bank to back up the USDT sitting on cryptocurrency exchanges, and last week these fears lead to a massive dumping of the token that had it trading below the $1 "stable" price.

Circle and Coinbase are encouraging other exchanges to join them in offering USD Coin, between this announcement, and the story I broke last week of Binance looking to add more stable coins to their platform - I believe we're looking at exchanges implementing a smooth transition away from Tether, just in case the worst of the rumors are true.

Now if the criticisms of Tether end up to be true, by the time we find out - it won't matter.  The more cryptocurrency is backed by stable coins that could pass an audit, the less impact bad news from Tether could have. At least I believe that's the plan we're seeing in motion now.