Gateway Fees

Fees for using Circle Gateway vary based on several factors, including the source blockchain and the size of the transaction. Each transfer includes a base fee that covers the gas costs incurred during the burn process on the source chain. In addition to these network-related costs, there is a percentage-based fee on the transaction size to support operational and infrastructure needs.

Gateway fees are in USDC and collected onchain at the time of the burn from the user's unified USDC balance. This mechanism ensures that USDC minted on the destination chain is equivalent to the requested USDC, and also matches the amount of USDC burned on the source chain.

At launch, the base fee is static and determined by the source chain of each burn intent. In the future, this fee will be dynamic based on network conditions. An estimation API endpoint will be available to help you retrieve the current required fee for a given transfer.

Transfers where the source and destination domains are the same don't incur the percentage-based fee, as these are instant withdrawals from the Gateway smart contract without invoking crosschain functions.

To support early adopters and encourage adoption, Circle is offering a promotional rate of 0.005% (half a basis point) on all instant crosschain transfers. Circle is committed to providing low-cost access to instant, non-custodial USDC transfers across multiple blockchains.

As the Gateway network continues to scale and mature, Circle may revise this promotional pricing. Users and partners maintaining high volume and balances during the promotional period may be eligible to extend the promotional pricing beyond the standard window.

If you have further questions about the current fee structure or would like to discuss long-term pricing options, reach out to Circle directly via the Discord support channel or your Circle account representative.

Excluding the percentage-based fee charged by Circle for using Gateway, network fees affect both the base fee charged by Circle and the cost of executing the mint onchain using the attestation provided by Circle. Generally, the overall gas cost increases linearly with the number of sources (burn intents) involved in a transfer.

The gas cost of using an attestation for a single-source transfer is comparable to the cost of a CCTP mint. Each additional source chain (burn intent) involved in the transfer adds approximately 60k gas to the mint transaction, which scales at a slower rate than the cost of the equivalent set of CCTP transfers. Hook data incurs a cost of about 16 gas per byte for both the mint and the burn.

For reducing overall gas costs, it may be preferable to keep the majority of Gateway funds on low-cost chains, so that the base fee for the burns Circle charges for is cheaper.

The following table shows the gas fees charged per burn intent, based on the source chain. The maxFee field of the burn intent must be greater than or equal to the value shown below, plus the applicable transfer fee.