Now live on mainnet, Circle Gateway enables access to instant crosschain USDC liquidity — designed for onramps, PSPs, exchanges, custodians, wallets, and more.
As the multichain world becomes the default for developers and users alike, managing stablecoin liquidity across chains has become increasingly complex for businesses building at scale. While products like CCTP and third-party bridging providers have improved the user experience of moving USDC between chains, many teams still face operational pain points behind the scenes.
Fragmented liquidity, varying transaction costs, and inconsistent settlement times create operational bottlenecks that slow growth and degrade UX. Payment service providers, exchanges, and crosschain infrastructure teams are often still forced to pre-position USDC across multiple chains, maintain chain-specific balances, and deal with overfunding, complexity, and execution delays—resulting in suboptimal capital efficiency.
Circle Gateway, now live on mainnet, is designed to solve these challenges. Gateway redefines crosschain UX by combining smart contract infrastructure with an offchain attestation service to enable a unified USDC balance instantly accessible crosschain in <500 ms. This improved capital efficiency and instant availability bolsters USDC utility as a powerful crosschain asset.
Starting today, Gateway is now available for builders on Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, OP Mainnet, Polygon PoS, and Unichain, with more chains coming soon, including Arc. Read on to learn more about key use cases and how to get started.
Use Cases Unlocked
Gateway is designed for businesses and developers who need fast, capital-efficient settlement across chains without the burden of fragmented liquidity management.
Gateway can help:
- Onramps and PSPs: Serve more users across chains with less working capital, simplify treasury and rebalancing overhead, and rapidly expand to new chains through a single integration.
- Exchanges: Instantly meet USDC withdrawal demand on any supported chain, eliminate rebalancing delays, and remove reliance on additional bridging infrastructure.
- Custodians: Offer seamless crosschain USDC access to clients, streamline USDC inventory management, and unlock new institutional applications in crosschain payments and settlement.
- Digital Wallets and Wallet Infrastructure: Display a single chain-abstracted USDC balance in wallet UIs. Enable one-click crosschain transfers or swaps in <500 ms and remove dependencies on third-party liquidity providers.
- DeFi Trading Firms and Solvers: Eliminate the need to pre-position or rebalance funds, deploy liquidity more efficiently across chains, and capture more crosschain opportunities with greater capital efficiency.
How Gateway Works
Developers can use Gateway to provide instant access to crosschain USDC liquidity through a simple three-step process:
Creating a unified USDC balance
- Deposit: The user’s USDC is deposited into a Gateway Wallet contract on any supported blockchain.
After the deposit is finalized, Gateway credits the deposit to the user’s unified USDC balance. Users can instantly access this unified balance on any supported chain, regardless of where the USDC was originally deposited.
Using a unified USDC balance
- Sign: The user signs a message to initiate an instant transfer. Behind the scenes, the developer submits the burn intent to the Gateway API. Gateway verifies the request and returns an attestation if the user’s unified USDC balance is sufficient.
- Execute: The developer submits this attestation to the Gateway Minter contract on the destination chain. The contract authorizes a mint of USDC for the intended recipient, while Gateway uses the user-signed burn intent to burn the matching amount from the user’s unified USDC balance on the source chain.
Gateway Design Principles
Crosschain shouldn’t inherently be accompanied by liquidity fragmentation or UX friction. We envision a world where crosschain feels like a single-chain experience. Access to USDC should be available at next-block speeds through a unified balance, while ownership is always retained by the user. What’s needed is a seamless, chain-agnostic framework that allows businesses to move stablecoins wherever they’re needed, when they’re needed, without friction—unlocking liquidity as a true utility, not a technical challenge.
To achieve this, Gateway is designed with three core principles that ensure security, speed, and simplicity in a multichain world.
- Non-custodial: USDC held in Gateway smart contracts remain under the depositor’s control at all times. Accessing USDC instantly requires both a user signature and a Gateway attestation, and funds cannot be moved or burned without user authorization. In the unlikely event that the Gateway API is unavailable for any reason, users can initiate a trustless withdrawal and complete the withdrawal after a 7-day period.
- Next-block speed: Gateway’s offchain attestation is designed to be available within a single block interval. Once the user signs a burn intent, the corresponding USDC can be minted on any supported chain in the very next block. Users get the speed and reliability of a single-chain experience even while moving value crosschain.
- Single integration: Gateway uses a consistent contract interface and API on every supported chain. Integration is made easy with a single plug into the Gateway system, gaining instant USDC mobility across supported chains. This makes future chain expansion more seamless, minimizing bespoke per‑chain technical overhead.
Build with us
The future of chain-abstracted USDC is here with Circle Gateway and developers are already designing creative solutions with this infrastructure. We appreciate our launch partners who are building alongside us to unify crosschain liquidity and enhance UX, including: Aori, BlockRadar, Cray, Daimo Pay, Dfns, Eco, Enclave Money, Fireblocks, Particle Network, Rath Finance, Rhinestone, RockawayX, and Superform.
Gateway is permissionless to integrate. Explore the developer docs to get started now.
