Circle CCTP Leads Crypto Bridges With $3.33 Billion in Seven-Day USDC Volume

Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), which moves $USDC between 17 blockchains, handled $3.33 billion over the past seven days. That is more than twice the $1.52 billion processed by @LayerZero_Core, according to bridge volume rankings from DeFiLlama.

Stablecoin Bridges Take the Top Spots

$USDT0, the cross-chain version of @Tether's dollar coin, ranked third at $631 million. It was followed by the bridge run by @HyperliquidX at $385 million and @chainlink at $307 million. DeFiLlama's rankings categorise all of these as bridges, and the figures are consistent with its bridge volume table, which tracks 24-hour, seven-day and 30-day flows.

The ranking shows that stablecoin-focused routes account for much of the activity at the top of the table. CCTP and USDT0 are both built around a single issuer's dollar token, while LayerZero is a general messaging network that supports many assets across a far larger number of chains. DeFiLlama lists LayerZero as covering 113 chains, against 17 for Circle's protocol.

How CCTP Moves USDC

CCTP works differently from traditional bridges that lock tokens in a vault and issue a wrapped version on the destination chain. According to Circle's developer documentation, the protocol transfers USDC across blockchains using a burn-and-mint process, without traditional bridge liquidity pools. The USDC is destroyed on the source chain and an equivalent amount of native USDC is issued on the destination chain, so the user receives the canonical Circle-issued token rather than a wrapped copy.

That design is one reason the protocol has become a default route for moving dollar liquidity between networks. Circle's documentation lists support across a growing set of chains, including Arbitrum, Avalanche and Base, and says CCTP can also be used for EURC and registered third-party assets.

Bridge rankings shift quickly, and DeFiLlama's figures are revised as new transfers are indexed, so the numbers for individual protocols can differ depending on when the data is pulled. The gap between CCTP and the next-largest bridge has nonetheless been wide in recent DeFiLlama snapshots.

Sources:

• DeFiLlama: Bridge Volume Rankings
• Circle Developers: Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol
• Circle Developers: Supported Blockchains and Domains