Our new crosschain forwarding service enhances Circle’s interop products by reducing risk for developers and improving UX. Try it now with CCTP on testnet.
Our new crosschain forwarding service enhances Circle’s interop products by reducing operational cost and risk for developers, and improving UX with faster end-to-end speed. Try it now with CCTP on testnet.
Today, crosschain development often involves far more than a single smart contract call. Take Circle CCTP as an example: after burning USDC on a source chain, developers are still responsible for reliably fetching attestations, submitting transactions on the destination chain, managing wallets for gas, handling retries, and explaining destination gas requirements to users.
To solve this problem, we’re excited to introduce our new crosschain forwarding service, now integrated directly into CCTP to eliminate this operational burden. The service initially supports crosschain routes to Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Ink, Linea, Monad, OP Mainnet, Polygon PoS, Sei, Sonic, Unichain, and World Chain, with additional blockchain support coming soon.
This new forwarding service has already been in use in the multichain ecosystem, powering the CCTP crosschain experience for Hyperliquid users. It seamlessly enables one-click USDC deposits from CCTP-enabled chains to Hyperliquid's orderbook DEX by removing the need to fetch an attestation prior to minting on HyperEVM.
Beyond CCTP, the forwarding service is also available for Circle xReserve, allowing blockchain teams to enable automatic minting of their USDC-backed stablecoins on destination chains for their users.
Looking ahead, by the end of H1 2026 we plan to expand forwarding support across all CCTP-enabled routes and introduce forwarding as an option within both Bridge Kit and Circle Gateway.
How it works
The forwarding service enables developers to configure destination-chain execution through Circle-operated infrastructure. No additional signatures. No new smart contracts. No additional infrastructure to deploy or maintain. No added third-party trust assumptions.
For existing CCTP integrations, this is a natural extension of the current flow. Developers will specify forwarding instructions using existing hookData and maxFee parameters in CCTP while burning USDC on the source chain. The forwarding service programmatically validates the request, signs the attestation, and broadcasts the destination-chain mint transaction with low latency and high reliability. The forwarding fee, which covers destination gas and a service fee, is deducted directly from the USDC minted on the destination chain.
From the end user’s perspective, the transfer completes faster without additional steps or gas requirements on the destination chain.
Why it matters
Crosschain forwarding remains one of the most persistent challenges in crosschain app development. Teams typically face two tradeoffs:
- They can operate their own infrastructure, which requires managing RPC access, monitoring, gas funding, retries, and operational coverage across every supported chain; OR
- They can integrate with third-party services, each with distinct APIs, trust assumptions, reliability characteristics, and failure modes. This often complicates debugging and increases integration surface area.
Our forwarding service replaces these approaches for CCTP integrations with a first-party, fully managed forwarding layer built directly into Circle’s crosschain interoperability products, as an optional feature.
Key benefits for current and future CCTP integrators include:
- Faster chain expansion: Automatically expand to more supported chains without deploying new infrastructure.
- Reduced end-to-end speed: Inefficient attestation fetching can increase total transfer time by 50–200%. Forwarding removes this bottleneck.
- Lower operational costs and risk: Save costs by eliminating additional infrastructure, gas wallet management, and ongoing maintenance.
- Improved user experience: Users are not required to hold destination-chain gas or manage multiple transaction steps.
What’s next
This new forwarding service is part of our broader effort to simplify crosschain app development with the Circle interop stack. Fundamentally, it serves as an orchestration primitive that abstracts crosschain execution complexity without introducing additional trust layers.
Over time, we’re looking to enable more flexible application patterns, such as accepting USDC on any supported chain and settling to any destination, streamlined onboarding flows, and multichain asset issuance.
Try the forwarding service now with CCTP on testnet, and join our Early Access Program for priority access as it expands to additional Circle products.
