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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://developers.circle.com/llms.txt

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Gateway charges a transfer fee and a gas fee for crosschain transfers. If you use the Circle Forwarding Service to handle the destination mint, Gateway also charges a forwarding fee.

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Transfer fee

Crosschain transfers incur a percentage-based fee of 0.005% (0.5 basis points) on the transfer amount.
  • When charged: On crosschain transfers (source and destination are different blockchains)
  • Payment method: Deducted from your unified USDC balance at the time of burn
Same-chain transfers (withdrawals where source and destination are the same blockchain) do not incur the transfer fee.

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Gas fees

Each burn intent includes a gas fee that covers the cost of executing the burn transaction on the source blockchain. The gas fee varies by source blockchain:
Source blockchainGas fee (USDC)
Arbitrum$0.01
Avalanche$0.02
Base$0.01
Ethereum$2.00
HyperEVM$0.05
OP$0.0015
Polygon PoS$0.0015
Sei$0.001
Solana$0.15
Sonic$0.01
Unichain$0.001
World Chain$0.01

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Forwarding fees

When you use the Circle Forwarding Service to handle destination chain minting, Gateway charges an additional forwarding fee. The forwarding fee has two parts:
  • Forwarding service fee: A flat fee per transfer
  • Forwarding gas fee: Covers the cost of executing the mint on the destination blockchain
The forwarding service fee is $0.20 per transfer on all destination blockchains. The forwarding gas fee is approximately the same as the gas fee charged for a burn on the corresponding blockchain. To estimate the forwarding fee before submitting a transfer, call the /estimate endpoint with enableForwarder=true. The returned forwardingFee value includes both the service fee and the gas fee.
When the destination is Solana and automatic Associated Token Account (ATA) creation is enabled, the forwarding fee also includes the Solana rent cost for the token account.
For details on how the forwarding fee is collected across burn intents, see Fee collection in the Forwarding Service topic.

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Setting maxFee

When creating a burn intent, set the maxFee field to cover the gas fee, the transfer fee, and any forwarding fee: 
maxFee ≥ gas fee + forwarding fee + (transfer amount * 0.00005)
For example, transferring 1,000 USDC from Base without forwarding:
  • Gas fee: $0.01
  • Transfer fee: 1,000 * 0.00005 = $0.05
  • Minimum maxFee: $0.06 (60,000 in USDC subunits)
For the same transfer with the Forwarding Service enabled:
  • Gas fee: $0.01
  • Forwarding fee: $0.21 (service fee plus forwarding gas fee)
  • Transfer fee: 1,000 * 0.00005 = $0.05
  • Minimum maxFee: $0.27 (270,000 in USDC subunits)
Add a buffer to your maxFee calculation to account for gas fee fluctuations.

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Optimizing costs

To reduce overall costs:
  • Use low-cost source blockchains: Keep the majority of your Gateway balance on blockchains with lower gas fees (such as OP, Polygon PoS, Sei, or Unichain)
  • Consolidate burn intents: The gas cost of minting scales slower than multiple individual CCTP transfers. Each additional burn intent adds approximately 60k gas to the mint transaction.