Circle’s 2026 vision for crosschain interoperability, liquidity orchestration, and institutional asset issuance across the internet financial system.
When the internet was first conceptualized, networks operated as siloed intranets. The advent of a standardized network stack enabled reliable data exchange across systems, allowing any network to plug into the same set of protocols and unlocking the proliferation of information and communication use cases.
Today, we live in a multichain world. Value can move across blockchains, but it does so through a mix of vendors and inconsistent processes across otherwise siloed ecosystems. Circle already powers a significant share of crosschain USDC movement today, but as more assets, applications, and institutions move onchain, the internet financial system needs an interoperability stack with the same reliability and scale that the internet brought to open information exchange.
The first phase of building that stack focused on secure transport. Developers set out to solve one of the earliest interoperability challenges: moving assets safely between chains. Circle helped define that phase through Circle CCTP, the leading burn-and-mint protocol for moving USDC securely across blockchains. Since launch, CCTP has processed more than $110 billion in cumulative USDC transfer volume and supports more than 20 chains,1 becoming core infrastructure for wallets, exchanges, DeFi apps, and bridge providers across the multichain ecosystem.
But interoperability does not stop at secure transport of USDC. CCTP solves how USDC can move securely across chains, but it does not address other critical requirements for the internet financial system, including fast and consistent settlement, expansive asset support, and simple yet robust crosschain execution.
Today, settlement speed still varies significantly across chains, making crosschain value movement difficult to manage and scale. More assets, especially real-world assets such as tokenized funds, equities, and private credit, need the same caliber of secure interoperable infrastructure that USDC already benefits from. And crosschain execution must become easier to build and manage, without forcing developers and users to depend on brittle, multi-step workflows, infrastructure complexity, and layered trust assumptions.
These challenges define the next phase of our roadmap for the interoperability stack. Building on the foundation established by CCTP, Circle is investing across settlement acceleration, broader asset interoperability, and orchestration to make crosschain value movement more seamless, efficient, and usable at internet scale.
Faster, more predictable settlement
Even as crosschain infrastructure has improved, settlement speed still inherently varies across blockchains. Different blockchain finality models create different waiting periods, user experiences, and operational constraints for developers and businesses.
Circle is addressing that challenge by building faster-than-finality capabilities on top of its secure CCTP foundation.
With CCTP: Fast Transfer, developers can enable crosschain USDC settlement in seconds without waiting for source chain finality before minting on the destination chain. This makes crosschain value movement more predictable, improves capital efficiency, and gives USDC greater utility across diverse ecosystems.
Circle Gateway extends that progress by giving businesses access to a unified, chain-agnostic USDC balance that can be used across 12 chains in <500 ms. With monthly volume reaching $400 million and continuing to grow,2 Gateway is seeing accelerated demand for instant access to crosschain liquidity. Instead of pre-positioning capital and manually rebalancing funds across ecosystems, businesses can access USDC instantly wherever it’s needed.
Gateway also unlocks entirely new patterns of economic activity. With its nanopayments capability, Gateway enables gas-free USDC transfers down to $0.000001, allowing high-frequency transactions to be batched and settled efficiently across chains. This opens up emerging use cases such as per-request access to paywalled content, APIs, and data, as well as new models where autonomous agents coordinate and transact for compute and marketplace services in real time without being constrained by traditional payment systems and fee structures.
Together, CCTP and Gateway help make settlement more predictable, capital more accessible, and crosschain activity more efficient.
Interoperability beyond USDC
Circle has already helped address liquidity fragmentation for USDC through CCTP’s burn-and-mint infrastructure. But as more assets come onchain, especially RWAs such as tokenized funds, private credit, and new fiat stablecoins, the next challenge is extending those same interoperability benefits beyond USDC.
That is where the next advancement for CCTP becomes essential.
Expected later this year, CCTP will expand its burn-and-mint model beyond USDC to support additional Circle-issued assets such as EURC, USYC,3 and cirBTC, while extending these capabilities to asset issuers working with Circle to bring similar multichain distribution, interoperability, and configurable controls to their own digital assets.
This matters significantly in a growing multichain market where asset issuers need more than token creation. They need infrastructure that supports broader distribution, improved liquidity, and greater usability of their assets.
Arc, an open Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for real-world economic activity, is integral to that future by serving as a liquidity hub and institutional-grade environment for asset issuance and capital formation. With low, predictable fees with stablecoins as gas, deterministic sub-second settlement finality, and a geo-diverse institutional validator set, Arc provides the operational standards that institutional participants can confidently build upon. Arc’s unique properties enable it to serve as a coordination layer for issuance and liquidity routing, enabling more efficient economic activity across chains.
Asset issuers can originate assets on Arc and securely expand distribution across more than 20 chains through CCTP. From a single point on Arc, issuers can manage and update asset configurations seamlessly across all supported chains. Liquidity can move in seconds to wherever demand emerges across ecosystems. This creates a flywheel effect where broader distribution drives liquidity, liquidity improves usability, and usability compounds an asset’s network effects.
In this way, Circle’s interop strategy is expanding from solving crosschain experiences for USDC to helping solve it for a broader range of new and existing digital assets.
Simpler crosschain workflows
Even as settlement improves and liquidity becomes more accessible, building and managing crosschain activity remains complex. Developers today often have to coordinate multiple transactions, signatures, gas management, destination execution, and fee handling across different chains. These fragmented processes increase operational overhead and result in unreliable user experiences.
To address this, Circle is investing in orchestration, a more unified approach to how crosschain workflows are executed, with the goal of making crosschain actions seamless with a single click.
We started by building a forwarding service that automates destination-chain execution for crosschain transfers, reducing operational complexity while improving speed and reliability. Instead of building and maintaining their own broadcasting infrastructure, developers can now simply enable forwarding within CCTP, Gateway, and other supported platform services.
Bridge Kit builds on this foundation by giving developers a streamlined way to implement crosschain flows through simple SDK methods. Using CCTP with built-in forwarding under the hood, Bridge Kit helps developers design crosschain app experiences more reliably and with less overhead.
Deposit Kit is being developed to enable seamless app funding experiences, including one-click crosschain deposits that abstract away underlying chain complexity for end users.
Additional services such as Circle Fee Service and Circle Workflows are designed to address two of the most persistent challenges in crosschain development: fragmented fee handling and coordinating multi-step execution across chains.
Circle Fee Service is built to enable quote-based crosschain transfers by giving developers a single upfront quote that bundles required fees, collects them on the source chain, and provides exact destination amounts. This removes the need to estimate and reconcile multiple fee components across services, giving developers a more consistent way to handle fees and support more predictable crosschain experiences.
Circle Workflows is designed to coordinate multi-step, multichain workflows at the protocol level, enabling complex operations such as fund movement, contract execution, and settlement to behave as a single, unified action. Rather than relying on fragile, sequential transactions that can fail mid-flow, developers can define end-to-end workflows that execute more reliably across chains.
Together, these orchestration services are designed to reduce the number of components developers need to manage directly. The result is a crosschain experience that feels more unified, more reliable, and significantly easier to build, integrate, and scale.
Circle's Interop Stack unlocks new experiences and use cases
Solving the challenge of crosschain interoperability is not just about improving infrastructure. It is about enabling new forms of economic activity across the internet financial system.
For applications, it makes onboarding and funding easier. Trading platforms like Hyperliquid have integrated crosschain USDC funding experiences, reducing the complexity users typically face when moving capital into an account.
For businesses operating across ecosystems, it streamlines access to liquidity. With Gateway, USDC can be accessed instantly across supported chains without the need to continuously pre-position and rebalance funds. Firms like RockawayX are using Gateway to reduce liquidity fragmentation and access capital more efficiently.
For asset issuers, it creates a path toward broader multichain distribution. CCTP will extend Circle’s interoperability model to more assets like RWAs, and Arc provides an institutional-grade settlement layer and liquidity hub with the privacy, predictability, and operational standards needed to serve institutional users.
For high-frequency economic activity, Gateway supports a different class of use case. AI-native platforms such as OpenMind are leveraging this infrastructure to support agentic nanopayments, where capital needs to move efficiently at very small denominations without gas and at high velocity.
And for end users, Circle’s upcoming USDC Bridge brings Circle’s interoperability infrastructure into a direct, first-party app experience. Built on the same underlying CCTP infrastructure used by developers and partners, USDC Bridge is designed to give individuals a simple and transparent way to move USDC across supported chains. It is one user-facing expression of Circle’s broader interoperability strategy, extending that infrastructure into a more accessible experience for everyday crosschain transfers.
Help us build what you need
Interoperability is becoming the foundation for how value moves across the internet. We’re building the Circle platform to make that movement seamless for the businesses, developers, and users who rely on it.
If you’re creating new crosschain products or issuing new digital assets and looking to expand distribution, we want to hear from you.
Share your priorities and feedback with the Circle interop team as we continue building the rails that power the internet financial system.
1. From launch on April 26, 2023 until April 9, 2026
2. March 1–31, 2026; April 2026 volume at $230M month-to-date as of April 9, 2026.
3. USYC is a digital asset token. Each USYC token serves as a digital representation of a share of the Hashnote International Short Duration Fund Ltd. (the “Fund”), a Cayman Islands registered mutual fund. The Fund has appointed Circle International Bermuda Limited (“CIBL”), a Bermuda Monetary Authority licensed digital asset business, as its token administrator, responsible for the management of USYC on behalf of the Fund. Shares of the Fund and USYC are only available to non-U.S. Persons, as defined under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Additional eligibility restrictions may apply. The information provided herein is solely for educational and informational purposes and should not be construed as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, financial instrument, or other product.
The product features described in these materials are for informational purposes only. All product features may be modified, delayed, or cancelled without prior notice, at any time and at the sole discretion of Circle.
Arc Testnet, Circle CCTP, Circle Gateway, Bridge Kit, Deposit Kit, Circle Fee Service, and Circle Workflows are provided by Circle Technology Services, LLC (“CTS”). CTS is a software provider and does not provide regulated financial or advisory services. You are solely responsible for services you provide to users, including obtaining any necessary licenses or approvals and otherwise complying with applicable laws. For additional details, please see console.circle.com/legal/developer-terms for the Circle Developer terms of service.
USDC and EURC are issued by regulated affiliates of Circle. A list of Circle’s regulatory authorizations can be found at circle.com/legal/licenses.
