Circle announces bridged-to-native USDC upgrade for Linea

Circle, the issuer of the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market cap USDC, plans to have the first seamless bridged-to-native USDC upgrade rolled out on layer 2 blockchain Linea.

In an announcement on Mar. 5, Circle said the zero-knowledge powered Ethereum (ETH) layer 2 will be the first blockchain to witness USDC (USDC) upgrade. Linea is set to move from a bridged version of USDC to a native version.

Circle introduced the Bridged USD Standard in November 2023 and since then, the stablecoin has become one of the most bridged assets within the crypto ecosystem. 

New blockchains often deploy the bridged version of the currently $56 billion stablecoin in their testnet or mainnet environment. Circle has, in the past, added native support to several EVM blockchains, rollups and other L2 platforms. 

However, Linea is set to be the first blockchain network to have its bridged USDC, or USDC.e, upgraded seamlessly to native issuance. It means deployment that offers the security of being fully reserved and redeemable 1:1 for U.S. dollars. 

“We’re making history with Circle by being the first to upgrade from bridged to native USDC with zero disruption. The same contract address, no liquidity fragmentation, just faster, more secure transactions—this is what building a seamless blockchain infrastructure looks like,” Linea posted on X.

The upgrade will see a bridging pause for USDC.e on March 16, 2025. However, USDC.e will remain usable in on-chain activities such as trading, spending and swapping.

As Circle notes in its blog post announcing the native USDC launch on Linea, support also means access to the stablecoin issuer’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol. 

Circle will also add CCTP V2 support for Linea after the zkEVM L2’s native USDC launch, connecting it to Ethereum, Avalanche and Base for cross-chain transfers.

Launched by Consensys, Linea has seen notable growth since its mainnet went live in July 2023. The number of decentralized applications on the network has surpassed 400, with more than $250 million in transactions.

Use cases seeing significant growth include decentralized finance, gaming, non-fungible tokens and digital identity, among others. The L2 leads as the top zkEVM by total value secured and, per DeFiLlama, currently boasts more than $190 million in total value locked.