Circle Partners with Axelar to Implement Cross-Chain Solutions for USDC
Avalanche, Cosmos, Ethereum, Polygon, and Sui will be the first blockchains to integrate with this new cross-chain initiative.
In an announcement on October 21, Circle, the company behind the second-largest stablecoin USDC in the crypto market, revealed a partnership with Axelar to enhance USDC's role and applications in cross-chain environments.
Nice piece put together by the team at @axelarcore! Very excited to see the work being done with our recently announced Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol to help unlock seamless user experiences.
— Circle (@circle) October 20, 2022
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Avalanche, Cosmos, Ethereum, Polygon, and Sui will be the first chains to integrate with Axelar's General Message Passing (GMP). This move follows Circle's recent launch of its USDC bridge protocol and its expansion into five new blockchains last month.
Sergey Gorbunov, co-founder of Axelar, commented on the partnership with Circle:
"Integrating Circle's USDC Bridge with Axelar General Message Passing is a significant step toward achieving global interoperability across dApps on different chains."
Essentially, Circle oversees and verifies the movement of native USDC across chains, eliminating the need for wrapped assets. Axelar's GMP takes this process further, allowing applications to integrate Circle’s bridge seamlessly.
One of the main goals of the Circle-Axelar partnership is to simplify the user experience, from cross-chain swaps to single-click transactions and cross-chain NFTs. For example, users can use a wallet on Cosmos to purchase NFTs on Ethereum without needing to bridge assets through multiple steps or download a new wallet. The NFTs can then be utilized in applications built on Cosmos, even though they were purchased on Ethereum.
