Stable-coin issuer Circle has released Circle Gateway on mainnet, giving users a single USDC balance that can be tapped across seven blockchains—Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon and Unichain. Transfers settle in less than 500 milliseconds, a design the company says eliminates liquidity fragmentation while simplifying cross-chain payments and trading. Digital-wallet provider Eco is already using the service to aggregate liquidity, allowing it to execute larger orders with lower latency and fees. In a separate move the same day, decentralized-exchange aggregator 1inch introduced what it calls the first native, trustless swaps between Solana and more than a dozen Ethereum Virtual Machine networks, removing the need for bridges or third-party messaging protocols. The feature, available through the 1inch dApp, wallet and Fusion+ API, locks assets in chain-specific escrows and completes trades atomically, shielding users from maximal extractable-value exploits. Co-founder Sergej Kunz said the integration "erases one of the biggest boundaries in the space" and pushes DeFi toward a chain-agnostic future. By bypassing bridges, the system addresses security concerns highlighted by hacks such as the $320 million Wormhole incident in 2022, while letting Solana and EVM liquidity serve each other without wrapped tokens. The back-to-back launches underscore a broader industry drive to make digital-asset markets faster, safer and interoperable, as developers look to knit together once-siloed blockchains and reduce the operational risks that have hampered cross-chain activity.