Circle introduced a solution that unifies USDC balances across different blockchains, enabling instant usage of funds without cross-chain bridges or pre-distributed liquidity.
The Circle team announced the launch of Gateway, a multichain gateway for the USDC stablecoin that allows users to manage a single balance across multiple blockchain networks.
According to Circle’s blog, Gateway solves a key challenge of the multichain ecosystem — liquidity fragmentation and delays in transferring USDC. Previously, businesses had to pre-allocate USDC on each blockchain to meet user demand, which led to excess capital costs, management complexity, and reduced operational efficiency.
Instead of maintaining multiple separate wallets and balances, Gateway creates one unified USDC account accessible across all supported blockchains. For users, it appears as if coins exist simultaneously on every network, with transfers between them happening instantly. Gateway simplifies liquidity management and makes interacting with USDC as seamless as within a single chain.
Gateway offers three main advantages:
- Security and control. USDC is stored in non-custodial smart contracts, accessible only after user signatures and off-chain attestation. If the Gateway API becomes unavailable, a trustless withdrawal with a seven-day delay is provided.
- Speed. Transactions finalize in roughly 500 milliseconds.
- Ease of integration. Developers need only one API and smart contract to access Gateway across all supported blockchains, minimizing architectural complexity.
The Circle team emphasizes that Gateway is suitable for a wide range of services, including:
- Payment gateways and PSPs;
- Crypto exchanges;
- Custodians
- Digital wallets
- DeFi traders
- Market makers
Utilizing Gateway will enable:
- extend user reach with fewer working capital requirements;
- simplify treasury management;
- avoid delays from rebalancing;
- streamline USDC reserve management;
- enable new opportunities for cross-border payments;
- display a unified balance;
- support fast, simple transfers and swaps;
- avoid the need to hold liquidity separately on each chain.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Founder of Circle, says that Gateway is “a huge step in improving cross-chain UX and safety.” According to him, the solution will help build a more interconnected multichain ecosystem, where USDC becomes a truly universal tool for payments and trading.
Gateway is already live on public blockchains including Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, OP Mainnet, Polygon, and Unichain. Support for additional networks will be added in the near future.
The Circle team also unveiled its own blockchain network, Arc, designed for financial services.
