Why we settle in USDC on Base.
Picking a single stablecoin and a single chain made everything simpler. Here's the reasoning, and the multi-chain story underneath it.
Pick one stablecoin, pick one chain, build the rest of the product against that pair. That's how Softmax got off the ground without drowning in multi-everything complexity. The pair: USDC on Base.
The first integration that ships always trades configurability for legibility. The right call almost always.
Why USDC, not USDT or DAI
- Issued by Circle, regulated, fully backed in cash + short-term Treasuries. The redemption guarantee is the strongest in the stablecoin market. For an accounting product, that matters more than yield.
- Native everywhere. No bridge wrappers, no USDC.e ambiguity, no “wait which USDC is this” question. Customers paying in USDC on Polygon land USDC at our settlement endpoint with no token confusion.
- Best on-ramp + off-ramp coverage by far. Both ends of the payment flow have the most options.
Why Base, not Ethereum or Polygon
- Cheap. Sub-cent transactions even during congestion. We make you sign transactions; we shouldn't make signing cost $20.
- Fast. ~2-second blocks. The propose → approve → sign loop feels responsive instead of pending.
- Coinbase-stewarded with Optimism technical chops. The team has skin in the game and the rollup is among the more conservative.
- USDC is native (not bridged). One less mental model to hold.
- The earn-vault story is real. Morpho, Aave, sDAI, Spark — the curated yield surface we'll wire Treasury into is already deployed and audited on Base.
What about multi-chain?
The product reads multi-chain (Base / Ethereum / Arbitrum / Optimism / Polygon) because that's where customer wallets actually are. The Treasury page already aggregates USDC balances across all five via the multi-chain RPC manager. Books will classify transactions on each chain into the same seven categories.
Where it counts — Softmax's own subscription billing, invoice payment settlement, the curated yield vaults — we currently default to Base. Customers can pay from any chain Thirdweb Bridge supports (85+); the funds settle to your Base wallet in USDC.
What changes the picture
Three things would push us toward another chain:
- A material design partner who lives entirely on a different chain (e.g. a Solana-native trading shop). Solana support is already on the v1.5 roadmap for exactly this reason.
- A Base outage or sustained capacity issue. The multi-chain RPC manager already has fallback transports per chain; the settlement chain question is harder but the architecture isn't Base-coupled.
- A USDC alternative with better composability + the same regulatory posture. We watch this; nothing today qualifies.
For now, USDC on Base is the answer. It made shipping the AR loop possible in days instead of weeks. The configurability comes later, when we know which configurations matter.