Circle Gateway adds cirBTC and EURC, with a 1-basis-point fee outside Arc

Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has added its bitcoin-backed token cirBTC and its euro stablecoin EURC to Gateway, a service that lets users hold funds spread across multiple blockchains as a single balance. In a blog post on Oct. 23 (U.S. time), Circle said developers and businesses can now hold one unified balance per asset across cirBTC, EURC and USDC and draw on it on any supported chain.

Circle said balances become available on other chains in under 500 milliseconds after a deposit is finalized. The figure of more than $10 billion in volume is based on internal Circle Gateway data as of Oct. 23.

EURC on six chains, cirBTC on two

Supported blockchains differ by asset. According to Circle's developer documentation, EURC is available on six chains — Circle's own blockchain Arc, Ethereum, Avalanche, Base, Solana and World Chain — while cirBTC is supported only on Arc and Ethereum. USDC is available on 13 chains, including Arbitrum and Polygon.

Each asset keeps its own balance, and Gateway never converts between them. A EURC deposit credits a EURC balance and a cirBTC deposit credits a cirBTC balance, which is why both the source and destination chains must support the asset being moved. Decimals also differ: USDC and EURC use six decimal places, cirBTC uses eight.

Transfers work by burn-and-mint: the token is burned on the source chain and the same amount is minted on the destination chain. Because Circle issues both assets, it said Gateway can mint them natively on destination chains without relying on a third-party liquidity provider or a wrapped token from another company. To mint EURC on Solana, Circle announced in a separate notice the same day that it had deployed a new Solana pre-mint address. Circle warned that sending EURC to that address will result in a loss of funds and that it is intended for Circle's use only.

No fees on Arc

Fees depend on the chain. On Arc, Gateway fees for cirBTC and EURC are waived at launch. Outside Arc, both assets carry a fee of 1 basis point (0.01%) of the transfer amount, while USDC stays at 0.5 basis point (0.005%). Moving $10,000 to another chain would cost $1 in cirBTC or EURC and $0.50 in USDC. Fees and source-chain gas are paid in the asset being sent, so a cirBTC transfer pays its fees in cirBTC.

Nanopayments, a small-payment feature built on Gateway, now also covers the two assets. It aggregates payments off-chain and settles them in on-chain batches, removing per-payment gas charges; Circle cited AI agents buying data and compute as a key use. Non-USDC assets are supported only on EVM chains, however, so EURC nanopayments are not available on Solana.

Gateway is non-custodial. Deposits are held in Gateway Wallet contracts, and users can also withdraw directly from those contracts without going through Circle's API. That route requires a seven-day wait, and the rule applies equally to cirBTC and EURC.

EURC trading on Upbit is about one-seventieth of USDC's

cirBTC is an institutional token backed 1:1 by bitcoin held at a regulated entity in the Circle group. According to Circle's documentation, only qualified businesses can mint and redeem it through Circle Mint. As of Oct. 25, it was not listed on the Korean won markets of the South Korean crypto exchanges Upbit and Bithumb.

EURC does trade in South Korea. At 8:30 p.m. KST on Oct. 25, EURC traded at 1,493 won and USDC at 1,344 won on Upbit's Korean won market. At the same time on Bithumb, EURC was at 1,500 won and USDC at 1,345 won. EURC's 24-hour trading turnover on Upbit was about 15.01 million won, roughly one-seventieth of USDC's roughly 1.1 billion won.

Circle said the expansion runs on the same contracts, APIs and SDKs that support USDC on Gateway today, and that USDC requests, responses and behavior remain unchanged. Circle extended its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) to EURC on Sept. 2, and on Sept. 9 launched Fast Deposit, which it said funds Gateway balances up to 40 times faster.