By Isaac • September 21, 2026 3:12 pm •
Circle has opened a new route for institutions that want dollar liquidity without selling the Bitcoin sitting on their balance sheets.
The company said eligible Circle Mint customers can now deposit BTC, mint Circle Wrapped Bitcoin, or cirBTC, and use that token as collateral to borrow USDC through supported third-party lending markets. The coordinated process is available on Arc and Ethereum.
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That sounds simple. The important part is what has been compressed into one process.
Bitcoin does not natively plug into smart contracts. Institutions that wanted to borrow against it have typically had to choose a wrapped version, move assets between platforms and interact with a lending protocol.
They then had to manage settlement back to
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