About

Circle is a financial technology company focused on enabling seamless, instant, and low-cost money movement using blockchain-based stablecoins. Its primary products include USDC (a regulated, fully-backed digital dollar), EURC (a digital euro), and USYC (an institutional-grade tokenized money market fund). Circle also offers the Circle Payments Network, which allows financial institutions to process global stablecoin payments, and Circle Mint for minting, redeeming, and managing USDC at scale. Additional services include digital wallets, smart contract templates, cross-chain transfer protocols (CCTP), and Paymaster for gas fee payments in USDC. Circle is licensed and regulated in multiple jurisdictions, ensuring compliance and security for its users.

History

USDC was created by Centre, a consortium co-founded by Circle and Coinbase to develop price-stable cryptocurrencies. Centre and USDC were simultaneously announced in May 2018. USDC was officially introduced and launched on Sept. 26, 2018, as an open, interoperable, safe, transparent, and trustworthy stablecoin. In August 2023, Centre was sunset as a stand-alone entity, and its responsibilities were fully transferred to Circle due to increased regulatory clarity and to streamline operations. Coinbase agreed to take an undisclosed equity stake in Circle and receive a portion of USDC reserve asset interest revenue.

Technological Upgrades

Originally launched on Ethereum, USDC has since expanded to offer native support (minted and burned) on an additional 15 networks. As of April 11, 2024, USDC is natively supported on Algorand, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Celo, Flow, Hedera, NEAR, Cosmos via the Noble appchain, OP Mainnet, Polkadot via the Polkadot Asset Hub parachain, Polygon PoS, Solana, Stellar, and zkSync. USDC also exists as a wrapped token bridged from Ethereum to networks such as BNB Smart Chain and Fantom. Circle supports a path to native support for networks that follow the Bridged USDC Standard. Circle has disclosed that Linea and Scroll have followed this standard, and Fantom is working towards native support too.

Occasionally, Circle releases backward-compatible updates to USDC. In November 2023, the first upgrade since early 2021 was announced for a phased rollout through January 2024. The USDC v2.2 upgrade “significantly reduced gas costs, improved support for account abstraction, and further bolstered security for transactions on EVM blockchains.”

Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol

First announced in September 2022, Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) went live on Ethereum and Avalanche in April 2023. CCTP facilitates the transfer of native USDC across networks through a “burn and mint” bridging method, rather than the traditional “lock and mint” method.

To use CCTP, users transfer native USDC on a supported source network to be burned. In return, an equivalent amount of native USDC is minted on a supported destination network and sent to the user’s specified beneficiary wallet address. As of April 11, 2024, CCTP supports transfers between Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Noble, OP Mainnet, Polygon PoS, and Solana.

Circle Web3 Services

In August 2023, Circle launched the Programmable Wallets product, allowing developers to embed customized crypto wallets into applications. Developers can customize wallets by integrating USDC, opting for wallet infrastructure models such as developer-controlled wallets or user-controlled wallets, opting for wallet account types such as externally owned accounts (EOA) or smart contract accounts (SCA), etc. ****Since this launch, Circle has expanded its Web3 services offering by introducing features such as the following:

• Postman Collection: Developers can test features and experiment with Programmable Wallets on testnets.
• Smart Contract Platform: Developers can integrate and manage smart contracts to allow for app features such as decentralized finance (DeFi) integrations, programmatic USDC transactions, NFTs, onchain loyalty programs, CCTP integration, etc.
• Gas Station: Developers can abstract away gas fees for end-users by sponsoring the fees. This ability can be subject to customized restrictions on the value of transactions, limits on gas used, etc.

After creating an account, developers can access Circle’s Web3 services through the Web3 Services Console. Notably, these services are typically free up to a certain usage level. Once the free usage tier has been hit, developers must pay for additional usage of the product, with the price decreasing as usage grows to certain levels. Supported networks for Web3 Services can be viewed here, and support for Solana is coming soon.

Circle Research

In September 2023, Circle launched its Circle Research arm to “accelerate and amplify technical innovation within crypto, blockchain, and Web3 through open-source research.” Its first contribution was releasing the open-source Perimeter Protocol, which allows developers to build USDC credit applications using the protocol’s smart contracts for lending pools, loan constructs, and permissioning. Since then, Circle Research has continued to publish research and/or open-source tools related to Robust Thresholds ECDSA Signatures, Recoverable Wrapper Tokens, R-Pools, and Chainmail.

Throughout 2024, Circle pursued deeper regulatory engagement and transparency initiatives. It strengthened reserves through the Circle Reserve Fund, managed by BlackRock, holding short-term U.S. Treasuries under SEC oversight released.

In June 2025, Circle completed its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.