For trading firms, neobanks, and payments companies, stablecoins have become a prominent settlement layer across B2B payments, cross-border payouts, and treasury operations. Stablecoin volume hit $33 trillion in 2025, up 72% year on year — and earlier this year, monthly stablecoin settlement volume surpassed ACH for the first time. (Sources: DefiLlama, Jan 2023 to May 2026; Forbes, April 2026.)
That shift is visible across the Fireblocks platform, where stablecoins now account for 69% of all digital asset transaction volume. (Source: Fireblocks platform data, Q2 2026.)
Even more telling, is that earlier in 2026, USDC became the leading stablecoin on the Fireblocks platform, overthrowing larger market cap stablecoins like USDT. Institutions are coming onchain, and they are looking to transact with regulated, compliant stablecoins, with USDC taking priority.
The open question is operational: how to run stablecoin flows at institutional scale, with the audit trails, policy controls, and settlement guarantees treasury and compliance teams require.
Stablecoin access doesn’t come with a control layer
Every stablecoin transaction that moves through an institution carries regulatory obligations: travel rule requirements, sanctions screening, counterparty verification, and multi-party approvals for transfers above threshold. Those requirements compound as volume and chain coverage grow.
The specific operational problems look different depending on where you sit. For trading firms and exchanges running USDC on multiple chains, maintaining separate pre-funded balances on each chain, managing gas tokens on each destination, and reconciling per-chain is standard operating overhead. Each new chain multiplies that: more wallet positions to monitor, more balance pools to manage, more reconciliation statements to produce.
For payments companies, the issue is regulatory coverage. Cross-border stablecoin settlement is faster and cheaper than correspondent banking, but the regulatory requirements remain. Enforcement is needed across every step of the transaction flow. Most stablecoin integrations don’t include a policy layer, so companies build one separately or carry the compliance exposure.
Both problems have the same root: the rails exist, but the control layer doesn’t come with them.
Built together
Circle’s Gateway and Circle Payments Network (CPN) are now natively accessible within Fireblocks, no ground-up infrastructure builds required, with the Fireblocks control layer on top.
Gateway: one USDC balance across every supported chain
Gateway gives Fireblocks customers a USDC Virtual Wallet that aggregates balances across supported chains into a single account.
Unlike bridge-based or LP-routed solutions, Gateway transfers execute directly. This means large transactions don’t face slippage, pool depth limits, or third-party counterparty exposure.
What changes operationally:
- Per-chain pre-funding is replaced by a single balance that deploys in real time to any supported chain
- Incoming USDC gets deposited automatically into the Gateway balance, no manual step required
- Cross-chain transfers execute without gas token dependency on destination chains
This consolidation is material for customers managing USDC across three or more supported chains. Customers on fewer chains, or those primarily focused on cross-border fiat payouts, will find CPN is better suited for their needs.
Processing USDC for our clients across multiple chains was one of our biggest operational challenges — balances in the wrong place at the wrong time, constant friction. With Gateway, we now have a single unified balance. We can offer true multi-chain USDC, in real time, without the overhead.
Luke Wingfield Digby
Co-Founder & Head of Corporate Development
CPN: real-time USDC onchain settlement to local-fiat in 50+ countries
CPN is a global network that consists of banks, payment services providers (PSPs), and virtual asset providers (VASPs), and enterprises that enable consumer, business, and institutional payments with near real-time settlement via stablecoins. A typical flow is: a payments company sends USDC from their Fireblocks wallet, and the recipient receives local fiat currency, with no correspondent bank in the flow.
CPN brings issuer direct USDC settlement to the Fireblocks Network for Payments, with local rail coverage across major payment corridors in Latin America to APAC. Customers access it through the same integration used for local payment rails and on/off-ramps, CPN is now a routing option. Fireblocks handles provider connectivity, how you manage your beneficiaries, as well as RFIs. Transaction signing runs through the same policy-governed infrastructure applied across your entire operation.
What CPN replaces: multi-day correspondent banking settlement, NOSTRO pre-funding requirements across corridors, and per-corridor reconciliation. Capital that was sitting in pre-funded correspondent accounts is freed for operational use. Settlement that took days completes in minutes.
Fireblocks as the control layer
Gateway and CPN sit inside Fireblocks, the platform that gives you control over every stablecoin, rail, and counterparty in your operation. Circle brings the USDC liquidity, direct execution, and global fiat reach. Fireblocks brings:
- The same transaction authorization policies governing your other digital asset flows apply to every Gateway transfer and CPN payout
- Counterparty whitelists enforced at the point of transfer, not reconciled after the fact
- Transfers above your defined thresholds route through multi-party approval automatically
- Travel rule data attached to qualifying transactions as part of the flow, not as a separate compliance step
- Sanctions screening running against the same policy engine already in use for every other asset on the platform
The result is one set of controls across your entire stablecoin operation, regardless of which chain the USDC is on or which asset was used. Together, Circle and Fireblocks give you both from day one, with no separate build.
Fireblocks customers can now reach 50+ countries for USDC-settled local fiat payouts — without leaving the environment where they already manage policy, compliance, and approvals. That’s CPN as a coordination layer: drop NOSTRO prefunding and correspondent delays without rebuilding your infrastructure.
Spencer Spinnell
SVP, Global Payments and Enterprise Partnerships
Any stablecoin, any rail, with full policy controls
USDC is where most operations start, but it’s rarely where they stop.
The same wallets, policies, and audit trail configured for USDC extend automatically as you add new stablecoins, open new corridors, or bring on new counterparties. No separate compliance build each time. No replatforming as your operation grows.
Circle provides the rails. Fireblocks is the control layer that makes them production-ready.
What this means for your operations now
For existing Fireblocks customers, Gateway is available via Console or API with same-day activation. CPN is also available for customers who are already approved on CPN, while new customers will need to apply to join.
For payments companies running stablecoin settlement alongside correspondent banking: CPN through Fireblocks gives you USDC-to-local fiat payouts across 50+ countries, under the policy controls your compliance team already approved, through the integration you already have.
For trading firms managing USDC across multiple chains: Gateway replaces per-chain pre-funding and the reconciliation overhead that comes with it, within the same workspace used for everything else.
Now is the time to turn your stablecoin strategy into production-ready operations. Let’s talk about how Fireblocks can partner with you today.
