After Terra collapsed in May 2022, Cosmos had a liquidity problem.

The ecosystem had over 100 different bridged versions of USDC—artifacts of various bridge protocols and IBC routing paths. None of them were the real thing. If you wanted actual USDC backed by actual dollars, you had to bridge from Ethereum and trust whoever operated that bridge.

Then dYdX announced they were building their Cosmos chain and needed USDC for collateral. The stablecoin problem became urgent.

The Pitch#

Jelena Djuric had been at the Interchain Foundation and knew the ecosystem’s pain points. She connected with Zaki Manian and our team at Strangelove. The idea: a purpose-built chain for asset issuance. Not a general-purpose smart contract platform—a minimal, secure chain optimized for one thing.

We’d approach Circle directly. Convince them that Cosmos deserved native USDC, not another bridged derivative. The chain would handle minting, burning, and IBC transfers. Circle would handle the dollars.

Strangelove became Noble’s engineering partner. We built the chain, specified the asset integrations, and tested everything. Six months of stealth development.

The Architecture#

Noble is deliberately minimal. No smart contracts, no DeFi primitives, no token swaps. Just a Token Factory module that lets issuers mint and burn assets, plus IBC for moving them everywhere else.

The technical insight: on Ethereum, CCTP (Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol) is a set of smart contracts. On Noble, it’s a Cosmos SDK module built into the chain itself. First non-EVM implementation of CCTP.

Two features made the UX work:

No gas token required. Fees are paid in USDC directly. Users don’t need to acquire a separate token just to move their stablecoins.

Packet forwarding. Assets route through Noble automatically. Send USDC from Ethereum to Osmosis, it flows through Noble in one transaction. The user doesn’t need to know Noble exists.

Launch#

Noble mainnet launched March 27, 2023. Native USDC went live September 12, 2023—part of Circle’s “Stable September” alongside Base, NEAR, Optimism, Polkadot, and Polygon.

The numbers moved fast. $98 million of native USDC issued in the first month. Over $330 million in IBC transfer volume. dYdX migrated $300 million of collateral from Ethereum.

By early 2025, Noble had over $450 million USDC in circulation—the fifth-largest chain for native USDC issuance.

Why It Worked#

Noble solved a coordination problem. Before, every Cosmos chain had to deal with stablecoin fragmentation independently. After, there was one canonical USDC that worked everywhere via IBC.

The minimal design was the point. Noble doesn’t compete with DeFi chains—it serves them. Osmosis provides the DEX. dYdX provides the perps. Noble provides the dollars.

Jelena and her team raised $3.3M from Polychain in October 2023, then $15M from Paradigm in November 2024. The chain now supports multiple issuers: Circle, Ondo, Hashnote, Frax.

The Lesson#

Sometimes the right architecture is the boring one. Noble isn’t innovative in its technology—it’s a standard Cosmos SDK chain with a token factory. The innovation was in positioning: being the neutral layer that asset issuers trust and DeFi protocols integrate.

Cosmos needed this for years. It just took the right team to build it and the right moment to launch.

Noble is at noble.xyz. The original Strangelove implementation lives at github.com/strangelove-ventures/noble.