TL;DR
The stablecoin market cap passed roughly $320 billion in 2026, and the GENIUS Act gave dollar-backed stablecoins a federal legal framework in the US.
As dollars spread across dozens of chains, the bottleneck moves from issuance to movement: getting a dollar from where it is to where it's needed, fast and at par.
Native settlement matters. Circle's CCTP V2 and LayerZero's OFT standard move stablecoins by burn-and-mint, not wrapped IOUs, so the dollar that arrives is the canonical one.
Across routes USDC, USDT0, and USDH across 23+ chains, selecting intents, CCTP V2, or OFT automatically. USDC transfers up to $10 million settle as native USDC.
For most of crypto's history, the interesting question about stablecoins was which one you trusted. Tether or Circle. Centralized or algorithmic. Backed by what, audited by whom. That question is mostly settled now. The GENIUS Act became US law in July 2025, giving payment stablecoins a federal framework that requires 1:1 backing in high-quality liquid assets, and the total stablecoin market cap has climbed past roughly $320 billion. Dollars onchain are no longer a fringe instrument. They're infrastructure.
So the interesting question moved. It's no longer which stablecoin wins; it's how a dollar gets from one chain to another without losing its value or its identity on the way.
Issuance Is Solved. Movement Isn't.
A stablecoin is only useful where it is. A USDC balance on Ethereum does nothing for a trader who needs margin on Hyperliquid or a payment that has to settle on Base. The dollar has to move. And moving dollars across chains has historically been the ugliest part of the stack: slow bridges, wrapped tokens that depeg under stress, liquidity fragmented across a dozen incompatible representations of the "same" dollar.
This is the part that scales badly. Issuance is now a regulated, well-capitalized business. Movement is still a patchwork. Base is leaning into payments; Plasma launched stablecoin-first. As more chains do this, the number of chain pairs that need a working dollar route grows faster than any single bridge can cover by hand.
The Tell Is Native Settlement
The difference between a dollar that holds par and a dollar that doesn't is whether it's native or wrapped.
A wrapped stablecoin is an IOU. Some bridge locked the real USDC on one chain and minted a representation on another. That representation is only worth a dollar as long as the bridge holding the collateral is solvent and unexploited. When the bridge is questioned, the wrapped version trades at a discount, and the people holding it discover that their dollar was a claim on a smart contract.
Native settlement removes the IOU. Circle's CCTP V2 burns USDC on the origin chain and mints fresh, canonical USDC on the destination: same issuer, same token, no intermediary collateral. LayerZero's OFT standard does the equivalent for USDT0, minting and burning natively rather than pooling liquidity. The dollar that arrives is the dollar Circle or Tether issued, not a derivative of it.
For a market built on the premise that a dollar is always a dollar, this is the whole game. Native settlement is what lets a stablecoin keep its identity as it crosses a chain boundary.
Across Routes Dollars by Mechanism, Not by Guess
Across treats stablecoin movement as a routing problem with three answers. It supports USDC, USDT0, and USDH across 23+ chains, and for each transfer it selects the settlement mechanism that fits.
For most transfers, the relayer network fills in about 2 seconds: a relayer fronts the dollars on the destination chain and reclaims capital later through a batched settlement bundle. For large USDC transfers, Across routes through CCTP V2, which needs no relayer capital and settles native USDC up to $10 million per transfer. For USDT0, it uses OFT's native mint-and-burn. The integrator and the user call one interface; Across picks intents, CCTP V2, or OFT based on token, size, and route.
Some routes are zero-fee outright. USDC to USDH on Hyperliquid, for example, is sponsored: the transfer cost is subsidized and the user pays nothing to move the dollar.
The point isn't the three mechanisms; it's that choosing between them is invisible. A dollar moving from Solana to Base and a dollar moving from Ethereum to Hyperliquid take different paths underneath, and the person moving them never has to know which.
Why This Compounds
Every new stablecoin chain adds a node to a graph; a graph with more nodes needs more edges, and each edge is a route that has to actually work. A regulated dollar that can only sit on one chain is a worse product than the same dollar reachable anywhere within seconds. That is why the routing layer gets more valuable as the graph grows: the dollars are commoditized, the connections between them are not.
Moving regulated dollars at par leaves no room for the bridge itself to be the risk: a settlement layer that loses funds turns a par-value dollar into a haircut. Across has carried these flows since 2021 with no protocol-level exploit, which for a regulated-dollar rail is the qualification, not a footnote.
The dollar already won. What's still being decided is who moves it, and Across is built to be the layer that does.