Circle Product Management Director: The Future of Cross-Chain: Building an Interoperability Technology Stack for Internet Financial Systems

Author: Alokik Bhasin, Director of Product Management at Circle
Original article link: https://www.circle.com/blog/building-the-interop-stack-for-the-internet-financial-system

Key points of this article: Circle's vision for cross-chain interoperability, liquidity orchestration, and institutional-grade asset issuance in 2026—building the infrastructure for the internet financial system.

When the internet was first conceived, networks operated in isolated intranet forms. The emergence of standardized network protocol stacks enabled reliable data exchange across systems, allowing any network to connect to the same set of protocols, thus giving rise to a massive boom in information and communication use cases.

Today, we find ourselves in a multi-chain world. Value can flow between blockchains, but the implementation relies on various vendors and inconsistent processes, with ecosystems still fragmented from one another. Circle has already captured a significant share of the current cross-chain USDC circulation, but as more assets, applications, and institutions move on-chain, the internet financial system needs a set of interoperability stacks whose reliability and scale should match the level of open information exchange brought by the internet.

The first phase of building this stack focuses on secure transfers. Developers are tackling one of the earliest interoperability challenges: securely transferring assets between chains. Circle has helped define this phase through Circle CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol)—a leading "burn-and-mint" protocol for securely transferring USDC between blockchains. Since its launch, CCTP has processed over $140 billion in cumulative USDC transfer volume, supporting over 20 chains¹, and has become core infrastructure for wallets, exchanges, DeFi applications, and cross-chain bridge providers in the multi-chain ecosystem.
But interoperability goes beyond the secure transfer of USDC. CCTP addresses how USDC can move securely between chains but does not cover other critical needs of the internet financial system, including: fast and consistent settlement, broad asset support, and streamlined and robust cross-chain execution.

Currently, there are significant differences in settlement speeds across chains, making cross-chain value flow difficult to manage and scale. More assets—especially real-world assets (RWA), such as tokenized funds, stocks, and private credit—need secure interoperability infrastructure on par with USDC. Cross-chain execution must become easier to build and manage, rather than forcing developers and users to rely on fragile multi-step workflows, complex infrastructures, and layers of trust assumptions.
These challenges define the next phase of our interoperability stack roadmap. Building on the foundation laid by CCTP, Circle is increasing its investment to cover three major areas: settlement acceleration, broader asset interoperability, and orchestration, making cross-chain value flow more seamless, efficient, and capable of achieving internet-level usability.

Faster, More Predictable Settlements

Even with improvements in cross-chain infrastructure, settlement speeds still exhibit inherent differences due to the various blockchains. Different blockchain finality models result in different wait times, user experiences, and operational constraints for developers and enterprises.

Circle is addressing this challenge by building "faster-than-finality" capabilities on top of its secure CCTP foundation.

With CCTP: Fast Transfer, developers can achieve second-level cross-chain USDC settlements without waiting for finality confirmation from the source chain to mint on the target chain. This makes cross-chain value flow more predictable, enhances capital efficiency, and gives USDC greater utility in diverse ecosystems.

Circle Gateway further advances this progress, providing enterprises with a unified, chain-agnostic USDC balance that can be accessed on 12 chains at speeds of less than 500 milliseconds. The monthly transaction volume for Gateway has reached $400 million and continues to grow², indicating an accelerating demand for instant cross-chain liquidity. Enterprises no longer need to pre-deploy funds and manually rebalance across ecosystems but can instantly access USDC where needed.

Gateway also unlocks new economic activity models. Through its nanopayments feature, Gateway supports USDC transfers as low as $0.000001 with no gas fees, allowing high-frequency trading to settle efficiently across chains in bulk. This opens doors to emerging use cases, such as pay-per-request access to paid content, APIs, and data, as well as autonomous agents coordinating and executing computational and market service transactions in real-time without being constrained by traditional payment systems and fee structures.

Together, CCTP and Gateway enable more predictable settlements, greater capital accessibility, and more efficient cross-chain activities.

Interoperability Beyond USDC

Circle has helped address the liquidity fragmentation issue of USDC through CCTP's "burn-and-mint" infrastructure. However, as more assets move on-chain—especially tokenized funds, private credit, and new fiat-backed stablecoins as RWAs—the next challenge is to extend the same interoperability advantages beyond USDC.

This is where the next phase of CCTP's evolution becomes crucial.

Expected later this year, CCTP will expand its "burn-and-mint" model from USDC to more assets issued by Circle, including EURC, USYC³, and cirBTC, while extending these capabilities to asset issuers partnering with Circle, allowing their own digital assets to benefit from similar multi-chain distribution, interoperability, and configurable control.

This is significant in an increasingly growing multi-chain market. Asset issuers need not only token creation but also infrastructure that supports broader distribution, improves liquidity, and enhances asset usability.

Arc—an open Layer-1 blockchain built specifically for real-world economic activities—will be a core component of this future, serving as a liquidity hub and institutional-grade environment for asset issuance and capital formation. With low and predictable fees (using stablecoins as gas), deterministic sub-second settlement finality, and a geographically distributed set of institutional validators, Arc provides operational standards that institutional participants can confidently build upon. Arc's unique attributes enable it to act as a coordinating layer for issuance and liquidity routing, facilitating more efficient cross-chain economic activities.

Asset issuers can initiate assets on Arc and securely extend distribution to over 20 chains via CCTP. Issuers can seamlessly manage and update asset allocations across all supported chains from a single node on Arc. Liquidity can flow to where demand emerges across ecosystems within seconds. This creates a flywheel effect: broader distribution drives liquidity, liquidity improves usability, and usability amplifies the network effects of assets.

In this way, Circle's interoperability strategy is expanding from solving cross-chain experiences for USDC to helping address cross-chain issues for a wider range of new and existing digital assets.

Streamlined Cross-Chain Workflows

Even with improved settlement speeds and more accessible liquidity, building and managing cross-chain activities remains complex. Today, developers often need to coordinate multiple transactions, signatures, gas management, target chain execution, and fee processing across different chains. These fragmented processes increase operational overhead and lead to unreliable user experiences.

To address this, Circle is investing in orchestration—a more unified way to execute cross-chain workflows, aiming for one-click cross-chain operations.

We first built a forwarding service that can automatically execute target chain operations for cross-chain transfers, enhancing speed and reliability while reducing operational complexity. Developers no longer need to build and maintain broadcasting infrastructure themselves; they can simply enable forwarding features in CCTP, Gateway, and other supporting platform services.

Bridge Kit further develops this foundation, providing developers with a simplified way to achieve cross-chain processes through a streamlined SDK approach. Bridge Kit utilizes CCTP with built-in forwarding capabilities at its core, helping developers design cross-chain application experiences more reliably with less overhead.

Deposit Kit is in development, aiming to achieve a seamless application top-up experience, including one-click cross-chain deposits, abstracting away the complexities of the underlying chains for end users.

Additional services like Circle Fee Service and Circle Workflows aim to tackle two of the most persistent challenges in cross-chain development: fragmented fee processing and coordination of multi-step cross-chain executions.

Circle Fee Service aims to enable quote-based cross-chain transfers by providing developers with a single pre-quote that bundles the required fees, collected uniformly on the source chain, and provides an accurate target chain arrival amount. This eliminates the need for cross-service estimations and reconciling multiple fee components, allowing developers to handle fees in a more consistent manner, supporting a more predictable cross-chain experience.

Circle Workflows aims to coordinate multi-step, multi-chain workflows at the protocol level, making complex operations like fund flows, contract executions, and settlements appear as a single unified action. Developers can define end-to-end workflows that execute more reliably across chains, rather than relying on fragile sequential transactions that may fail midway.

These orchestration services collectively aim to reduce the number of components developers need to manage directly. The end result is a more unified, reliable, and significantly easier-to-build, integrate, and scale cross-chain experience.

Circle's Interoperability Stack Unlocks New Experiences and Use Cases

Addressing cross-chain interoperability challenges is not just about improving infrastructure; it's about fostering new types of economic activities within the internet financial system.

For applications, it makes onboarding and top-ups more convenient. Trading platforms like Hyperliquid have integrated cross-chain USDC top-up experiences, reducing the complexity users typically face when transferring funds into their accounts.

For enterprises operating across ecosystems, it simplifies liquidity acquisition. Through Gateway, USDC can be accessed instantly across all supported chains without the need for continuous pre-deployment and rebalancing of funds. Companies like RockawayX are using Gateway to reduce liquidity fragmentation and acquire capital more efficiently.

For asset issuers, it creates pathways for broader multi-chain distribution. CCTP will extend Circle's interoperability model to more assets (like RWAs), while Arc provides an institutional-grade settlement layer and liquidity hub, equipped with the privacy, predictability, and operational standards required by institutional users.

For high-frequency economic activities, Gateway supports another class of use cases. AI-native platforms like OpenMind are leveraging this infrastructure to support agentic nanopayments, where funds need to flow efficiently in very small denominations, with no gas fees and at high speeds.

(PS: On February 17, Circle officially released a demo video on X https://x.com/circle/status/2023759340079927315 showcasing OpenMind's robotic dog Bits autonomously navigating to a charging station, plugging in, completing micro-payments between machines using USDC, all without human intervention, and then continuing to work.)
For end users, Circle's upcoming USDC Bridge will bring Circle's interoperability infrastructure into a first-party application experience directly facing users. USDC Bridge is built on the same underlying CCTP infrastructure used by developers and partners, aiming to provide individuals with a simple and transparent way to transfer USDC between supported chains. It is a user-facing expression of Circle's broader interoperability strategy, extending that infrastructure into a more convenient experience for everyday cross-chain transfers.

Help Us Build What You Need

Interoperability is becoming the foundation for value to flow across the internet. We are building the Circle platform to enable the businesses, developers, and users that rely on it to achieve seamless value flow.

If you are creating new cross-chain products or issuing new digital assets and wish to expand distribution, we want to hear from you.

Please share your priorities and feedback with the Circle interoperability team, and we will continue to build the infrastructure track that powers the internet financial system.

Notes:

1. From the launch on April 26, 2023, to April 9, 2026.

2. From March 1 to March 31, 2026; the monthly transaction volume as of April 9, 2026, was $230 million.

3. USYC is a digital asset token. Each USYC token represents a digital representation of a share in the Hashnote International Short Duration Fund Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "the Fund"), which is a mutual fund registered in the Cayman Islands. The Fund has designated Circle International Bermuda Limited ("CIBL")—a digital asset enterprise licensed by the Bermuda Monetary Authority—as its token manager, responsible for managing USYC on behalf of the Fund. Fund shares and USYC are offered only to non-U.S. persons as defined under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Additional eligibility restrictions may apply. The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be construed as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities, financial instruments, or other products.

The product features described in this material are for reference only. All product features are subject to change, delay, or cancellation at any time without notice, and are entirely at Circle's discretion.
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 offer regulated financial or advisory services. You assume full responsibility for the services provided to users, including obtaining any necessary licenses or approvals and complying with applicable laws. For more details, please refer to the Circle Developer Services Terms at console.circle.com/legal/developer-terms.
USDC and EURC are issued by Circle's regulated affiliates. A list of Circle's regulatory authorizations can be found here.