Circle Gateway adds unified crosschain balances for cirBTC and EURC
Victoria Shinder2 min readCircle has extended Gateway, its crosschain balance service, from USDC to two more of its own assets: Circle Wrapped Bitcoin (cirBTC) and the euro stablecoin EURC. In a post dated 23 October, Circle says developers and businesses can hold one unified balance per asset and reach it on supported chains in under 500 milliseconds after a deposit finalises, instead of pre-funding inventory on every network.
EURC is supported on Arc, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Solana and World Chain; Circle's wallet example describes cirBTC on Arc and Ethereum. Because Circle issues both assets, Gateway mints them natively on the destination chain rather than relying on a third-party liquidity provider or a wrapped token from another issuer.
Circle's developer documentation sets out the mechanics. Each asset has its own balance, and Gateway never converts between them: a transfer burns an asset on the source chain and mints the same asset on the destination, so both chains must support it. The balance and deposit APIs select the asset with a token field whose accepted values are USDC, EURC and cirBTC, with exact casing. Fees and gas are charged in the asset being moved. Each asset has its own decimals, and the documentation warns that treating cirBTC as a 6-decimal asset makes amounts 100 times too large or too small. Nanopayments extends to EURC and cirBTC on EVM chains only. As with USDC, a direct ERC-20 transfer to the Gateway Wallet contract loses the funds.
What it means
The product claim is about capital efficiency — one pool instead of one per chain. The engineering claim worth noting is the decimals warning: integrations written for USDC will carry a hard-coded six, and for a bitcoin-denominated asset that is a silent 100x error in either direction. Anyone extending an existing Gateway integration should treat this as a code change, not a configuration change.