Circle expands USDC bridge

Circle has rolled out an official USDC Bridge that lets users move native USDC across 17 Ethereum Virtual Machine chains with a burn-and-mint transfer instead of wrapped tokens. (circle.com) (theblock.co) A bridge is the plumbing that moves tokens between blockchains. Circle’s system destroys, or burns, USDC on the source chain and creates, or mints, the same amount on the destination chain, which Circle says avoids liquidity pools and synthetic versions of the token. (developers.circle.com) (circle.com) Circle’s public CCTP page lists 21 supported blockchains for the protocol, including Solana and Starknet, but the new consumer-facing USDC Bridge launched on 17 EVM-compatible networks. The Block reported the launch on April 17 and said the interface shows fees up front and handles destination-chain gas automatically. (circle.com) (theblock.co) Circle has been building toward this rollout since it introduced Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol in April 2023 and upgraded it with CCTP V2 on March 11, 2025. Circle said V2 added “Fast Transfer” for settlement in seconds, while its developer docs say standard transfers from Ethereum and its layer-2 networks still take about 15 to 19 minutes. (circle.com) (developers.circle.com) The launch lands while Circle is also dealing with a proposed class action tied to the April 1 Drift Protocol hack. Reports on April 17 and April 18 said plaintiff Joshua McCollum sued in federal court in Massachusetts, alleging Circle failed to freeze about $230 million in USDC that moved through its cross-chain system after the exploit. (thestreet.com) (invezz.com) Drift, a Solana-based perpetual futures exchange, said on April 16 that the April 1 attack left $295 million in outstanding user losses and that it was working with law enforcement and forensics firms on recovery. Drift also said Tether and other partners had proposed up to $147.5 million in support for a recovery framework. (drift.trade) Blockchain forensics firm TRM Labs said attackers drained about $285 million from Drift in roughly 12 minutes and bridged most of the stolen assets to Ethereum within hours. TRM said its initial investigation suggests the hack was likely carried out by North Korean hackers after a weeks-long social-engineering campaign. (trmlabs.com) The legal fight turns on a basic feature of Circle’s bridge design: every transfer is validated by Circle before USDC is minted on the destination chain. Circle says that validation model makes cross-chain transfers safer and more capital-efficient than pool-based bridges, while the lawsuit argues it also gave Circle a point where it could have intervened. (circle.com) (developers.circle.com) Circle had not published a detailed response in the sources reviewed here by Saturday, April 18. For now, the company is asking users to trust a faster bridge at the same moment critics are asking how much control Circle really has when money is already moving through it. (circle.com) (thestreet.com)