Circle Mint lets institutions borrow USDC against Bitcoin without selling their BTC

Selling Bitcoin to access cash is the crypto equivalent of selling your house to pay rent. Circle wants to end that tradeoff for institutional holders. The company launched a Digital Asset-Backed Borrowing feature on its Circle Mint platform, giving eligible institutions a way to unlock USDC liquidity while keeping their BTC position intact.

The feature went live on September 2, 2026, with Morpho as its first integrated lending market, running across both Ethereum and Arc, Circle's new EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain.

The workflow has three steps. An institution deposits BTC into Circle Mint. That BTC gets wrapped into cirBTC, a tokenized version backed 1:1 by BTC held in custody at Circle National Trust. The cirBTC then serves as collateral inside Morpho vaults, and the resulting USDC loan settles directly back into the borrower's Circle Mint account.

Repaying the loan releases the collateral, returning cirBTC and eventually the underlying BTC. The whole cycle stays within the Circle Mint interface, so institutions avoid stitching together custody, bridging, and DeFi protocols on their own.

Chainlink's proof-of-reserves verification underpins the cirBTC backing, giving lenders on the other side of the trade an on-chain confirmation that the collateral is real and accounted for. Interest rates and collateral ratios are determined by Morpho's market parameters rather than set by Circle, which means they float with supply and demand.