Circle Payments Network

Circle Payments Network (CPN) is a next-generation payment infrastructure designed to reduce reliance on multiple intermediaries while enhancing transparency, security, and speed. Using onchain primitives and built-in compliance capabilities, CPN delivers near-instant cross-border settlement. CPN allows participating financial institutions to rapidly expand their global footprint with a single integration.

This developer documentation focuses on Originating Financial Institutions (OFIs) who facilitate cross-border payments for their customers. OFIs interface with ultimate senders initiating cross-border transactions, and act as the onramp for fiat to crypto. Complementing this, Beneficiary Financial Institutions (BFIs) receive stablecoins and act as the offramp into local fiat, delivering funds to end recipients. CPN actively coordinates OFIs and BFIs to deliver cross-border transactions with reduced costs and delays compared to traditional systems. CPN is part of Circle's broader ecosystem of financial products, designed to work with the USDC ecosystem to optimize your global payment operations.

Before onboarding as an OFI, you should meet the following prerequisites for CPN:

• Access to USDC liquidity
• A custodial solution for USDC and technical capability to interact with blockchains (sign and observe transactions)
• Established KYC and AML processes in place for your customers

• Real-time FX quoting and locking: CPN obtains competitive quotes from multiple providers instantly. FX rates are locked, which eliminates FX risk for both OFIs and their customers during the payment process.
• Smart routing: CPN selects the optimal BFI based on pricing and operational preferences defined by the OFI.
• Stablecoin-powered transfers: Payments are settled using USDC across supported blockchains and exchanged to local fiat currencies for the receiver.
• API integration: CPN offers a comprehensive API suite, which allows for quick integration into existing systems. Features include real-time payment monitoring with webhooks, detailed developer documentation, and dedicated support to ensure a successful integration process.
• End-to-end encryption: Travel rule and beneficiary account data is encrypted by the OFI throughout the payment process and can only be decrypted by the designated BFI.
• Ticketing support for payments, disputes, and reversals: CPN allows integrated institutions to create and manage support tickets through the API. Circle handles routing and resolution of issues across the network.

The following entities are referenced in this documentation and make up the key entities that allow CPN to perform cross-border transactions.

• Senders (external): Businesses or individuals initiating cross-border payments
• Receivers (external): Businesses or individuals receiving cross-border payments
• Originating Financial Institutions (OFIs): Financial institutions that interface with senders, onramp fiat to USDC, and connect with BFIs through CPN for transfer and fiat offramp
• Beneficiary Financial Institutions (BFIs): Financial institutions that receive USDC from OFIs through CPN and provide an offramp to local fiat currency
• Circle Payments Network (CPN): Orchestration layer that aggregates financial institutions, vets participants, and facilitates money movement through onchain and offchain services.

The CPN workflow for OFIs consists of four major stages:

• Quote generation
• Payment creation
• Crypto transfer
• Payment management

The following is a generic example of how a payment in CPN is performed. In this example, the OFI has a sender in the US. The sender already has an account and completed KYC with the OFI. The sender wants to pay a receiver in Brazil. The sender wants to pay with USD and the receiver wants to receive the payment in Brazil Real (BRL). The following steps occur:

1. Quote generation

   • OFI requests a list of quotes for the payment (USDC to BRL) from CPN
   • CPN aggregates quotes from multiple BFIs
   • CPN returns a list of quotes to the OFI
   • OFI selects the best quote or asks the sender to select their preferred quote

2. Payment creation

   • Sender accepts the quote
   • OFI gets the requirements for travel rule data and beneficiary account information
   • OFI creates a payment request (USDC to BRL) in CPN
     • OFI collects and encrypts necessary payment details, such as travel rule data and beneficiary account information, and includes the encrypted data in the payment request.
   • BFI reviews the travel rule data (and may request additional information) and approves the payment request

3. Onchain transaction

   • OFI requests an onchain transaction object to transfer USDC to the destination address from CPN to sign
   • OFI signs the onchain transaction object and sends to CPN
   • CPN validates and broadcasts the transaction
   • CPN notifies the OFI and BFI when the onchain transaction is confirmed

4. Fiat settlement (no OFI action required)

   • BFI initiates fiat payment after the onchain transaction is confirmed (transfer BRL to receiver's bank account)
   • BFI notifies CPN when the fiat payment is initiated and complete
   • CPN notifies the OFI with the appropriate payment statuses

5. Payment management

   • OFI can query payment status at any time from the CPN API
   • CPN provides real-time status updates on the payment via webhooks
   • Payment history and reporting is available for reconciliation