Circle, Solana team up to boost USDC interoperability

Circle, the issuer of popular stablecoin USDC, has partnered with Solana to bring its cross-chain transfer protocol to its blockchain ecosystem.

Circle designed the cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP) to enable the secure transfer of USDC between different blockchain ecosystems using the native mint and burn process, as stated on Wormhole’s website.

Solana developers can now natively swap USDC tokens from Ethereum and other EVM-compatible ecosystems, including Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Optimism, and Polygon. It will also be compatible with non-EVM blockchains as well.

CCTP first integrated with a non-EVM chain in October last year, when it partnered with Noble, a Cosmos-based token protocol, to bring USDC natively into the Cosmos ecosystem.

As Noble is integrated with Cosmos’ inter-blockchain communication protocol (IBC), CCTP is also functionally compatible with all Cosmos chains connected with IBC.

A handful of Solana ecosystem players will support CCTP from day one. This includes Wormhole, Allbridge, Mayan Finance, Drift Protocol, Sphere Labs, Cube Exchange, Jupiter Exchange, and Solend Protocol. Additional ecosystem projects are expected to go live in the following weeks.

Bridging protocols such as the CCTP are essential in the on-chain environment, which enables blockchain networks — which generally operate in siloed environments — to communicate with one another, allowing the transfer of digital assets across various ecosystems.

Traditional bridging solutions often have a handful of drawbacks, such as introducing additional trust assumptions and requiring users to pay significant gas fees.

As Circle, the issuer of USDC, designed CCTP, the protocol may be preferred over third-party bridges, especially when transferring stablecoin across different ecosystems.