Circle has launched a unified cross-chain infrastructure that enables businesses to access USDC balances across multiple blockchains.

An Aug. 19 announcement labeled the new product as Gateway, a system that addresses liquidity fragmentation issues that force companies to pre-position funds across chains and manage complex rebalancing operations.

Gateway combines smart contract infrastructure with an off-chain attestation service to create a single USDC balance accessible on Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, OP Mainnet, Polygon PoS, and Unichain.

Additional chains, including Circle’s Arc, will receive support in future releases.

The platform targets payment service providers, exchanges, custodians, digital wallets, and DeFi trading firms that require efficient cross-chain USDC management without operational overhead.

Gateway maintains non-custodial design principles, ensuring depositor control over USDC holdings at all times.

Fund access requires both user signatures and Gateway attestations, preventing unauthorized movements or burns. The system includes trustless withdrawal mechanisms allowing users to recover funds after seven days if the Gateway API becomes unavailable.

Unified UX for financial infrastructure

The system operates through a three-step process beginning with USDC deposits into Gateway Wallet contracts on any supported blockchain.

After deposit finalization, Gateway credits the unified balance and instantly makes funds accessible across all supported chains regardless of the original deposit location.

Users initiate transfers by signing burn intents, which developers submit to the Gateway API for verification and attestation generation.

Once users sign burn intents, corresponding USDC mints execute on destination chains within the subsequent block, providing single-chain experience speeds for cross-chain value transfers.

Among the use cases are payment service providers reducing working capital requirements while exchanges eliminate rebalancing delays.

Additionally, digital wallets display unified USDC balances, and DeFi trading firms deploy capital more efficiently across chains without pre-positioning funds.

Gateway represents Circle’s latest initiative to enhance stablecoin utility following several strategic moves this year.

The company introduced its Refund Protocol in April, establishing a non-custodial dispute resolution system for stablecoin transactions without centralized intermediaries.

Circle also recently announced Arc, its enterprise-focused layer-1 blockchain scheduled for public testnet between September and December 2025.

Arc will serve as high-performance infrastructure for stablecoin payments, foreign exchange, and capital markets applications while supporting USDC as its default gas token and offering sub-second settlement finality.

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U.S. Vice President JD Vance doubled down on the Trump administration’s deregulatory stance toward the crypto sector in remarks at the Bitcoin 2025 Conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

During his speech, Vance reaffirmed the administration’s opposition to former United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler’s regulation-by-enforcement approach to cryptocurrencies.

“We reject regulators,” Vance said. “We fired Gary Gensler, and we’re going to fire everybody like him.”

The former Senator from Ohio further claimed that the Trump administration is committed to cleaning up the “wreckage” from former U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, which saw extensive guardrails placed on the blockchain sector.

“We prioritize eliminating the rules, the red tape, and the lawfare that we saw aimed at our crypto by our predecessors,” Vance said. “We’re ending the weaponization of federal regulations against this community. To put it simply, Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is dead, and it is not coming back under the Trump administration.”

“With President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally in the White House,” he added.

Trump’s Crypto Ties Face Scrutiny

Vance’s comments come just days after Trump hosted an exclusive dinner for the top 220 investors of his namesake memecoin at Trump National Golf Club in Washington, D.C.

Critics of the event argue that the gala may have violated key presidential ethics provisions, citing concerns over potential foreign influences’ ability to purchase the cryptocurrency.

In a May 14 letter, three key Democratic members of the House of Representatives urged U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to unseal suspicious activity reports (SARs) into “politically oriented” Trump-affiliated ventures.

“Because the identities of the coin purchasers need not be publicly disclosed, there is no way to tell who is buying the coin, potentially allowing bad actors, including authoritarian governments and companies they control, to enrich the Trump family,” the House members said of $TRUMP.

The U.S. lawmakers have asked the requested SARs to be returned by May 30, though it remains unclear how Bessent will proceed.

Forward-looking: Recent big game releases appear to confirm that ray tracing and path tracing are the future of graphics rendering. However, these techniques remain prohibitively computationally expensive. The next major update to Microsoft’s DirectX API aims to address this and facilitate broader adoption of the technology.

Microsoft’s GDC presentation this week offered a glimpse into the future of DirectX ray tracing support. The company claims that DirectX Raytracing 1.2 could help developers double the performance of ray tracing and path tracing.

Two key features underpin the update: opacity micromaps (OMM) and shader execution reordering (SER). OMM can help path-traced games run up to 2.3 times faster by reducing shader invocations and optimizing opacity data to enhance rendering efficiency. Meanwhile, SER intelligently groups shader execution to minimize divergence, improving performance by up to 2 times.

Although ray tracing first emerged as a flashy extra feature in games like Battlefield V and Cyberpunk 2077, recent titles have made it mandatory, indicating that it will soon become standard. Examples include Star Wars Outlaws, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

Path tracing is a more advanced form of ray tracing that significantly improves the accuracy of dynamic lighting and shadows but comes with substantial performance costs. It typically requires high-end GPUs to run effectively in games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and the recently released Half-Life 2 RTX demo. Doom: The Dark Ages, launching in May, will also require ray tracing and offer optional path tracing.

Also see: Path Tracing vs. Ray Tracing, Explained

DirectX Raytracing 1.2 will become available to developers starting next month. As a result, ray tracing and path tracing could become significantly less demanding in new games over the next few years. Unsurprisingly, Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards will support the API update first, while Microsoft is collaborating with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to expand support.

Microsoft also shared more details on cooperative vectors and neural rendering, which aim to integrate AI workloads into real-time graphics rendering. A new foundational feature, Neural Block Texture Compression, significantly reduces memory usage – potentially benefiting users with GPUs that have 12 GB of VRAM or less. Additionally, neural supersampling and denoising are expected to enhance image quality in path-traced games.

DirectX neural rendering and cooperative vector support first appeared in January. Microsoft explained that neural rendering optimizes matrix-vector operations for AI training and enables smaller neural networks to run efficiently during GPU shading processes.

What you need to know

• Oppo announced at the MWC that will be collaborating with Google and MediaTek, to bring monthly AI updates to its phones.
• ColorOS 15 will be using Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash’s capabilities to cross-communicate with OPPO native apps.
• These updates are said to bring AI-enhanced photography, better gaming experiences along with increased device security.

OPPO has been basking in its Find N5 spotlight, after it showed off the world’s slimmest foldable and now, is jumping onto the next big thing—AI.

At MWC the company announced its AI- strategy in collaboration with Google today at the MWC in Barcelona and is promising to bring monthly AI updates to its phones.

In a press release, the company elaborated on how it will make these updates a reality. It said that Google will be at the center of its on-device AI, meaning Gemini will be able to communicate across OPPO’s native apps like Notes and Calendar. OPPO’s devices that are compatible with AI will get these new capabilities, thanks to the current Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash.

“We are excited to collaborate with OPPO to shape the future of mobile AI by bringing together Google technologies with OPPO’s exceptional hardware and software,” said Matt Waldbusser, managing director for Global Solution and Consumer AI, Google Cloud.

Talking about its AI strategy, the company says it’s working on establishing three key areas that focus solely on AI Productivity, AI Creativity, and AI Imaging which will help build better AI features for existing and future OPPO devices. That said, efficient AI programming needs an equally efficient and powerful chip. So, the company will also be collaborating with MediaTek which will bring optimized chips to OPPO’s AI table.

This collab is said to bring “AI-enhanced photography to next-generation gaming experiences, from intelligent security solutions to seamless device connectivity,” the press release added.

Speaking about monthly updates, the company is promising to bring at least one new AI update to compatible devices. While we don’t have much information as to when they will be rolled out, the company said “AI Search and integration of OPPO applications with Google Gemini are coming to the OPPO Find N5 soon.”

Lastly, features like AI Call Translator, which interprets calls in multiple languages in real-time, and AI VoiceScribe which summarizes information across voice calls, are said to show up in future updates.

While the Find N5 is the only device mentioned in the above update, it remains to be seen if these features will grace other OPPO devices as well.