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Circle stock price pump gains steam, but a crash may follow
GameFi Guides

Circle launches Gateway for USDC transfers across seven blockchains

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Stablecoin issuer Circle has launched Gateway, enabling instant USDC transfers across seven major blockchains.

Summary

  • Circle launched Gateway to unify USDC liquidity across seven blockchains
  • Gateway connects USDC on Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, OP Mainnet, Polygon PoS, and Unichain on launch day
  • According to Circle, Balances will be accessible cross-chain in <500 ms

Circle has made a significant step in USDC usability. On Tuesday, August 19, Circle launched Gateway on mainnet, connected to seven major blockchains. The platform unifies USDC balances across Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, OP Mainnet, Polygon PoS, and Unichain on launch day. Circle announced expansions on other chains, with Arc next in line.

Currently, stablecoin liquidity is fragmented across several blockchains. For this reason, exchanges require more capital to operate, and managing their treasuries is complicated. Moreover, rebalancing creates delays and higher costs.

Gateway provides a unified USDC balance across several chains, using a mix of smart contracts and off-chain attestation. According to Circle, cross-chain transfers happen in less than 500 ms, providing a single-chain experience.

Moreover, assets in the Gateway Wallet are self-custodial, remaining under user control. Specifically, assets cannot be burned or minted without user authorization. Additionally, users can initiate a trustless withdrawal even if the Gateway API is unavailable.

Circle riding on growing stablecoin demand

Users have to deposit USDC into a Gateway Wallet contract on any chain. As soon as they do, balances update on all chains. To transfer funds, the Gateway Minter mints USDC on the destination chain while burning on the source chain.

Circle is riding the wave of growing stablecoin adoption. According to the company’s Q2 reports, the company earned $658 million in revenue, up 53% from the previous year. The main reason for this rise was an 86% in USDC circulation, driven by demand for stablecoins.



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XRP
Crypto Trends

Ripple CTO Declares Blockchains Can Solve Problems Outside Of Cryptocurrencies

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Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure

Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David “JoelKatz” Schwartz, recently shared his view that blockchains are not only about cryptocurrencies but could also solve many other problems. He explained that the fintech company’s vision has always gone beyond digital coins, dating back to Ryan Fugger’s trust line idea in 2004. This early work, according to him, became the base for the company’s approach to connecting institutions and building trust networks. 

Ripple’s Vision Started With Trust Networks And Enterprise Adoption

The Ripple CTO pointed to Fugger’s work as the actual starting point for Ripple’s technology. Fugger builds his trust line system around the idea that people and institutions could form reliable networks of trust without always needing cash or coins in the middle. According to the CTO, this early concept eventually became the foundation for Ripple’s technology and the Interledger Protocol (ILP).

According to him, the Interledger Protocol, which connects different payment systems around the world, can, in many cases, work better than cryptocurrencies. “For those use cases where this is better than a cryptocurrency, there’s no world where people use cryptocurrencies instead of these kinds of solutions.” He added that this does not worry him because cryptocurrencies today are only a small fraction of what they could eventually become.

When the need is about trust and cooperation between established players, distributed ledgers like ILP can provide smoother and more practical outcomes. In his view, this does not detract from cryptocurrencies but demonstrates that blockchain can serve multiple roles simultaneously.

He explained that distributed ledgers offering solutions, even for problems that are not solved best with crypto, will make blockchains more useful for everyone. Rather than trying to take the place of cryptocurrencies, the aim here is to highlight the many uses of blockchains, with that broader value pushing adoption forward.  

Ripple CTO Explains Where Cryptocurrencies Still Have The Edge

The Ripple CTO also explained that cryptocurrencies remain vital in certain situations. “Digital assets without counterparties, without jurisdictions, that are censorship resistant and, yes, also volatile should only be used for the use cases where those things are truly advantages,” he said. He pointed out that these features are not helpful in every case but matter greatly where they are required.

The volatility and decentralized nature of digital assets are not weaknesses in those contexts but advantages in specific situations where independence and openness matter most. For example, when users need assets that cannot be blocked or controlled, cryptocurrencies provide a clear solution.

In his view, the best outcome is not to treat enterprise blockchains and cryptocurrencies as rivals but as partners in a larger ecosystem. Distributed ledgers can deliver better solutions while still leaving space for digital assets to thrive in the areas where they are most effective. This way forward is what will keep blockchain meaningful and functional well into the future.

XRP struggles amid bearish headwinds | Source: XRPUSDT on Tradingview.com

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Editorial Process for bitcoinist is centered on delivering thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We uphold strict sourcing standards, and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content for our readers.



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GameFi Guides

Why Circle, Stripe Are Launching Their Own Blockchains

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Every day, there seems to be a new blockchain for stablecoins.

Or at least that’s how it felt this week, when USDC (USDC) issuer Circle announced Arc, its own settlement network, shortly after payments giant Stripe accidentally revealed Tempo, built in collaboration with Paradigm.

They were the latest in a growing list. Startups Plasma and Stable both raised funds recently to develop dedicated chains for USDT (USDT), the $160 billion and largest stablecoin on the market.

Tokenization players are piling in, too.

Securitize is building Converge with Ethena, Ondo Finance announced its upcoming in-house chain earlier this year, and, just days ago, Dinari said it will soon launch an Avalanche-powered layer-1 network for clearing and settling tokenized stocks.

Stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets are rapidly growing segments of the crypto economy, and analysts project them to swell into trillion-dollar asset classes in the not too distant future. Stablecoins are poised to disrupt cross-border payments, while tokenization allows traditional instruments like bonds, funds and stocks trade around-the clock with faster settlements on blockchain rails, proponents say.

Read more: Stablecoin Payments Projected to Top $1T Annually by 2030, Market Maker Keyrock Says

Why build L1s?

Today, the vast majority of these tokens live and settle on public blockchains like Ethereum, Solana or Tron. These neutral networks give issuers global reach and liquidity, but they also come with certain constraints for asset issuers.

“Building their own L1 is about control and strategic positioning, not just technology,” said Martin Burgherr, chief clients officer at crypto bank Sygnum.

Stablecoin economics are shaped by settlement speed, interoperability, and regulatory alignment, so “owning the base layer” lets firms directly embed compliance, integrate foreign exchange engine and ensure predictable fees, he said.

There’s also a defensive motive. “Today, stablecoin issuers depend on Ethereum, Tron or others for settlement,” Burgherr said. “That reliance means exposure to external fee markets, protocol governance decisions, and technical bottlenecks.”

Custom chains allow companies to issue their own gas tokens, control transaction costs and keep network performance isolated from unrelated activity that may clog the network, said Morgan Krupetsky, VP of ecosystem growth at Ava Labs.

Increasingly, she said, blockchains are becoming the “middle and back office” of a company’s operations, powering transactions behind the scenes while user-facing apps may live across multiple chains.

“The idea of a company owning and customizing their end-to-end blockchain infrastructure is increasingly appealing,” she said.

The economics can be even more compelling than the tech. “The revenue opportunity from owning the settlement layer will dwarf traditional payment processing margins, said Guillaume Poncin, chief technology officer at web3 development platform Alchemy.

He said that the new chains can offer additional control and the ability to implement know-your-customer (KYC) checks and other innovations at the protocol level. While L1s can offer full customization, rollups are faster to deploy and secure.

In either case, Poncin noted, compatibility with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) makes it far easier to integrate with other blockchains and speed adoption.

How could this impact existing L1s?

It’s way too early to tell how the new chains will impact the incumbents, but some networks may feel the competition sooner than others, analysts said.

Coinbase analysts led by David Duong argued in a Friday report that Circle’s Arc and Stripe’s Tempo are targeting high-throughput, low-fee payments, which is Solana’s (SOL) sweet spot. Meanwhile, Ethereum with its institution-heavy user base is less likely to be disrupted in the near term, they wrote.

The process for the entrants to win over users could take years, Sygnum’s Burgherr said.

“New entrants will need not just technology, but also years of trust-building to shift the deepest liquidity and highest-value payments away from incumbent rails,” he said. “Financial institutions prize proven security, custody integration, and resilience under real-world stress.”

“That’s why Ethereum remains the institutional ‘Fort Knox,’” he said.



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Why ‘fast’ blockchains fail when it counts most
NFT Gaming

Why ‘fast’ blockchains fail when it counts most

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Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of crypto.news’ editorial.

For over a decade, blockchain developers have pursued one primary metric of performance: speed. Transactions per second (TPS) became the industry’s benchmark for technological advancement, as networks raced to outpace traditional financial systems. Yet, speed alone hasn’t delivered the kind of mass adoption once envisioned. Instead, high-TPS blockchains have repeatedly stumbled during periods of real-world demand. The root cause is a structural weakness rarely discussed in whitepapers: the bottleneck problem.

A “fast” blockchain, in theory, should excel under pressure. In practice, many falter. The reason lies in how network components behave under heavy load. The bottleneck problem refers to the series of technical constraints that emerge when blockchains prioritize throughput without adequately addressing systemic friction. These limits reveal themselves most starkly during spikes in user activity. Ironically, the moments when blockchains are needed most.

The first bottleneck appears at the validator and node level. To support high TPS, nodes must process and validate a vast number of transactions quickly. This demands significant hardware resources: processing power, memory, and bandwidth. But hardware has limits, and not every node in a decentralized system operates under ideal conditions. As transactions accumulate, underperforming nodes delay block propagation or drop out altogether, fragmenting consensus and slowing the network.

The second layer of the problem is user behavior. In high-traffic periods, the holding areas for pending transactions—mempools, flood with activity. Sophisticated users and bots engage in front-running strategies, paying higher fees to jump the queue. This pushes out legitimate transactions, many of which ultimately fail. The mempool becomes a battleground, and user experience deteriorates.

Third is the propagation delay. Blockchains rely on peer-to-peer communication between nodes to share transactions and blocks. But when the volume of messages increases rapidly, propagation becomes uneven. Some nodes receive critical data faster than others. This lag can trigger temporary forks, wasted computation, and in extreme cases, reorganization of the chain. All of this undermines trust in finality.

Another hidden weakness lies in consensus itself. High-frequency block creation is necessary for maintaining TPS, which places enormous stress on consensus algorithms. Some protocols were simply not designed to make decisions with millisecond urgency. As a result, validator misalignment and slashing errors become more common, introducing risk into the very mechanism that ensures network integrity.

Finally, there’s the question of storage. Chains optimized for speed often neglect storage efficiency. As transaction volumes grow, so does the size of the ledger. Without pruning, compression, or alternative storage strategies, chains balloon in size. This further increases the cost of running a node, consolidating control in the hands of those who can afford high-performance infrastructure and thereby weakening decentralization. To tackle the issue, one of the key tasks for layer-0 solutions in the nearest future will be to seamlessly unite storage and speed within one blockchain. 

Fortunately, the industry has responded with engineering solutions that directly address these threats. Local fee markets have been introduced to segment demand and reduce pressure on global mempools. Anti-front-running tools, such as MEV protection layers and spam filters, have emerged to shield users from manipulative behaviors. And new propagation techniques, like Solana’s (SOL) Turbine protocol, have drastically reduced message latency across the network. Modular consensus layers, exemplified by projects like Celestia, distribute decision-making more efficiently and separate execution from consensus. Finally, on the storage front, snapshotting, pruning, and parallel disk writes have allowed networks to maintain high speed without compromising on size or stability.

Beyond their technical impact, these advances have another effect: they disincentivize market manipulation. Pump-and-dump schemes, sniper bots, and artificial price inflations often rely on exploiting network inefficiencies. As blockchains become more resistant to congestion and frontrunning, such manipulations become harder to execute at scale. In turn, this lowers volatility, increases investor confidence, and reduces the load on the underlying network infrastructure.

The reality is that many first-generation high-speed blockchains were built without accounting for these interlocking constraints. When performance failed, the remedy was to patch bugs, rewrite consensus logic, or throw more hardware at the problem. None of these quick fixes addressed the foundational architecture. By contrast, today’s leading platforms are taking a different approach, building with these lessons in mind from the start. That includes designing systems where speed is a byproduct of efficiency.

The future of blockchain does not belong to the fastest. Once reaching Visa’s 65,000 TPS without errors, the blockchain should stay resilient under future pressure to become a full-fledged analogue of the web2 payment system, for the bottleneck problem is now central to blockchain engineering. Those who address it early will define the standard for performance in the next era of web3.

Christopher Louis Tsu

Christopher Louis Tsu is the CEO of Venom Foundation, a layer-0 blockchain protocol focused on scalable, secure, and compliant solutions for global web3 infrastructure. With over two decades of experience at the intersection of finance and technology, including leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft, he now leads the development of interoperable ecosystems that bridge traditional finance with decentralized technologies.



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Study finds 80% of crypto users quit blockchains within 90 days
Crypto Trends

Study finds 80% of crypto users quit blockchains within 90 days

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Blockchain networks are bleeding casual users, with four out of five low-engagement accounts going inactive within three months, a Flipside study reveals.

A recent study reveals a hard truth about blockchain ecosystems: most users lose interest quickly. Data from Flipside, which analyzed user behavior across networks such as Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Avalanche, shows that user retention is extremely low. The majority of users disappear within months unless they were already highly active from the start.

Flipside took a hard look at how wallets behave over time. They sorted users into three categories: low-value (scores 0-3), medium-value (4-7), and high-value (8+), based on how much activity they’d had on-chain before. Then, they checked each group every month for half a year, tracking how many were still active.

The retention cliff

The data shows a clear pattern: the first month is brutal. Low-value users — wallets with little or no previous activity — dropped off almost immediately. Per the report, consistently show the “lowest retention, falling below 5% after 6 months.” In plain terms: 95 out of every 100 of these wallets are gone in half a year.

The 6-month retention rates across blockchains, segmented by score bucket | Source: Flipside

Medium-value users — regular but not power users — fare better but still drop sharply early on before stabilizingm while high-value users decline slowly, losing just 5-8% of their numbers each month.

Some blockchains hold onto users better than others. For instance, Ethereum and Avalanche have the strongest retention for high-value addresses, keeping 35-38% active after six months. Solana, despite its size, lags behind, though details behind this gap remain unclear. Newer chains tend to have the steepest drop-offs, suggesting that early growth numbers might be misleading.

The metric trap

The report points out a common problem in crypto: chains chase big user numbers, but most of those “users” don’t last. Many are just passing through: airdrop hunters, speculators, or bots. The data makes it clear, real, sustained activity comes from a small fraction of addresses.

“If we zoom in on the retention charts, you can see it extremely clearly: only a handful of addresses are contributing any sustained activity or liquidity volume across the major chains studied.”

Flipside

This creates a dilemma: as blockchains want to show rapid adoption, they focus on inflating user counts. But if most of those users disappear, the growth isn’t real. The report argues that protocols would be better off targeting high-quality users from the start, even if that means slower headline growth.

Retention curves across all analyzed blockchains | Source: Flipside

Flipside’s research recommends that blockchain networks shift their focus away from low-value users. Incentives for one-time actions may boost short-term metrics, but they fail to build long-term engagement.

“It’s a hard pill to swallow, but the protocols that embrace this reality will outperform those that waste their incentives on addresses that won’t adopt them. The data clearly indicates that focusing on quality user acquisition and retention — rather than inflating address counts — represents the most sustainable path to ecosystem growth.”

Flipside

The report suggests that blockchain developers may want to consider putting more thought into designing tokenomics and reward systems that encourage longer-term participation. While short-term incentives can help drive initial activity, they often don’t lead to meaningful engagement over time.

According to the data, it seems more effective to create mechanisms that reward consistent involvement, which could help build a more stable and active user base. Prioritizing sustained interaction, rather than one-off actions, might offer a better path toward long-term growth.



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EU must scrap ill-fitting GDPR rules for blockchains
GameFi Guides

EU must scrap ill-fitting GDPR rules for blockchains

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Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of crypto.news’ editorial.

Last month, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) quietly published Guidelines 02/2025 on the processing of personal data through blockchain technologies. Buried in paragraph 63 is a line that jolted the entire web3 stack: “When deletion has not been taken into account by design, this may require deleting the whole blockchain.”

That one clause converts GDPR from the world’s privacy gold standard into a kill-switch for every permissionless network. Yes, that includes Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and the hundreds that settle trillions of dollars a year. 

The reality is worse than it seems because deleting every node is the only surefire way to “forget” a transaction. The guideline effectively makes permissionless networks non-compliant by default. Public consultation comes to a close on June 9—after that, the text hardens into Europe’s enforcement playbook. After that, Europe’s future is set.

GDPR was never written for tamper-proof ledgers

The 2018 GDPR authors assumed that data lives on centrally controlled servers where a single operator can erase it. Fast-forward to modern-day public blockchains; the opposite is true. Blockchains are distributed, immutable, and borderless.

Public chains rely on thousands of independent nodes that jointly guarantee history. Since rewriting a block would destroy that integrity, Article 17’s “right to be forgotten” collides head-first with the very feature that makes blockchains trustworthy. 

Techniques such as salted hashes, zero-knowledge proofs, and off-chain data pointers already minimize or obfuscate personal information—the new draft barely acknowledges them. Instead, it assumes that a single “data controller” can be identified, which is another notion that undermines decentralization and permissionless network integrity.

Sovereign-cloud ambitions are at risk

For two years, Brussels has promised a sovereign cloud—digital autonomy on European terms. The Commission’s latest policy goals are explicit. By 2030, three-quarters of EU businesses should run on cloud-edge technology; 10,000 climate-neutral edge nodes must be live, and the forthcoming Cloud and AI Development Act vows to triple the EU’s data-centre capacity within seven years.

All of this is framed as digital sovereignty. The problem is, sovereignty requires independence. Today, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud still hold roughly 70% of Europe’s cloud market. Members of the European Parliament warn that without an indigenous backbone, EU data remains one United States subpoena away from offshore exposure.

The only architecture that can realistically break that grip is a decentralized cloud in which infrastructure providers are coordinated by blockchain incentives, while data stays inside European data centres. If the EDPB renders those ledgers illegal by design, Brussels will hard-wire the very dependency it claims to end.

Paragraph 63 would kneecap Europe’s builders

By threatening whole-chain deletion whenever a single record cannot be erased, the draft injects existential risk into every European web3 project and ices any future venture funding. Its bias toward permissioned ledgers nudges developers back to the centralized silos policymakers say they oppose.

Labeling volunteer validators “data controllers” would saddle hobbyists with corporate-grade liability, shrink node participation, and weaken network security. Treating every peer-to-peer link as a regulated international transfer risks splintering global consensus behind national borders. 

Requiring human overrides for smart contracts breaks composability and undermines everything from decentralized finance to on-chain Environmental Social and Governance reporting, which big energy companies have already piloted. 

A joint call-to-action from the European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) and Web3Privacy Now warns that the draft guidelines “fundamentally threaten the existence of public blockchains” across Europe. What more evidence does the EU need to see that including this paragraph will kneecap its own builders?

Privacy-by-design beats prohibition

A cleaner path preserves both privacy and decentralization. Destroying an encryption key or proving in zero-knowledge that the key is irretrievable satisfies the intent of Article 17 without dismantling a ledger. The guidelines should recognize cryptographic deletion alongside physical erasure, state that a 32-byte on-chain hash is not personal data, and treat validators as processors rather than “controllers.” 

Brussels has already shown through the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation that bespoke rules for frontier tech can be crafted without blanket bans. Striking the kill-switch sentence, codifying key-to-dust deletion, and clarifying validator status would align GDPR with technical reality, all while keeping Europe’s sovereign-cloud strategy alive.

The public-comment portal closes in less than a month, and unless paragraph 63 is rebalanced, Europe risks spending the next decade paying U.S. hyperscalers to host ‘sovereign’ data. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will build on auditable, privacy-preserving rails beyond Brussels’ reach.

With time fast running out, builders, investors, and policymakers should hit that comment portal now, before Europe locks itself out of its own digital future.

Kai Wawrzinek

Kai Wawrzinek is a co-founder of the Impossible Cloud & Impossible Cloud Network. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in Law and a proven track record of building successful ventures. Recognizing the need for enterprise-grade solutions in the web3 space, Kai founded Impossible Cloud Network (ICN), a decentralized cloud platform aimed at creating a decentralized alternative to AWS. Before ICN, Kai founded Goodgame Studios, an online game company, and grew the company to over 1,000 employees and generated more than €1 billion in revenue, taking it public on Nasdaq in 2018 through a reverse merger. 



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