Circle’s cirBTC surpasses 5,000 issued tokens

Circle launched cirBTC on June 8, 2026, and the market apparently liked what it saw. The 1:1 Bitcoin-backed token has now crossed the 5,000-token milestone, a number that looks modest until you consider it was sitting at roughly 40 tokens in mid-August.

The product is Circle’s formal entry into the wrapped Bitcoin market, a corner of DeFi where your Bitcoin gets tokenized so it can participate in lending, borrowing, and other on-chain strategies without you ever having to sell it.

What cirBTC actually is

cirBTC, formally called Circle Wrapped Bitcoin, is a token where each unit is backed by one native Bitcoin held in custody by Circle National Trust, a federally chartered trust bank. The custody arrangement matters: Circle is not relying on a third-party custodian with ambiguous oversight, but rather an entity with a federal charter, which carries meaningful regulatory weight for institutional buyers.

Transparency is baked in through Chainlink Proof of Reserve, which provides real-time on-chain verification of the backing. Around September 24, 2026, the circulating supply stood at approximately 4,300.68 tokens, while total reserves sat at roughly 4,448.19 BTC. The excess reserve cushion means the backing ratio is better than 1:1 at any given snapshot.

Users mint and redeem cirBTC through Circle Mint, the same platform that handles USDC. The APIs are identical, which means any developer or institution already integrated with USDC can add cirBTC support without rebuilding their stack from scratch.

The token is available on both Ethereum mainnet and Arc, Circle’s own Layer 1 blockchain.

The wrapped Bitcoin wars

Circle is walking into a market that already has entrenched players. Wrapped Bitcoin, known as wBTC, has been the dominant tokenized Bitcoin product for years. Coinbase entered more recently with cbBTC. cirBTC is the third major institutional-grade contender, and Circle is pitching it squarely on the pillars that make compliance teams comfortable: regulated custody, real-time reserve verification, and a federally chartered trust bank in the custody seat.

The practical use case that Circle is emphasizing is collateralized borrowing. Users can deposit cirBTC as collateral to borrow USDC without liquidating their underlying Bitcoin position.

The jump from around 40 tokens in mid-August to over 5,000 by late 2026 represents a supply increase of more than 100x in a matter of months.

What to watch from here

The real test for cirBTC is whether it can close the gap with wBTC in terms of liquidity depth across major DeFi protocols. Deep liquidity matters because it determines how efficiently large institutions can enter and exit positions without moving the market against themselves.

Circle’s USDC integration is the strongest card in its hand here. Institutions that already use Circle Mint for USDC have a near-zero switching cost to add cirBTC to their workflow.

Circle National Trust’s federal charter gives cirBTC a compliance profile that is difficult for competitors to replicate quickly. As regulators in the US continue to clarify the rules around tokenized assets and digital custody, having a federally chartered custodian on the backing side could become a prerequisite for certain institutional investors.