Thanks for the quick answer, this all makes sense. Does this get limiting at all, in terms of wanting to mint new coins and not having the capital to do so?
As you can imagine, Circle maintains fairly sophisticated minting operations able to execute around the clock. All that is necessary for coins to be minted is for Circle to broadcast a properly signed transaction.
Now, of course, Circle can't just mint a limitless supply because we have a minting allowance set by CENTRE. While CENTRE itself can't mint coins, they do operate a minting allowance system with around the clock availability which can grant Circle a additional allowance per a ruleset to effectively manage risk.
This might seem to be getting into the weeds a bit but support for multiple minters (Circle and Coinbase here for example) is a significant differentiator between USDC and other reserve backed stablecoins.
That's like saying isn't it a bummer I cant just print money out of thin air to buy stuff. The whole point is to give people faith and trust in the stablecoin exactly because thie issuance process relies on locking up 1 USD.
