Gasless Mint: Receive USDC Without Holding Gas First

When you spend from Unified Balance, Circle Gateway burns USDC from escrow on your source chains and issues an attestation authorizing a matching mint on the destination chain. That last mint is an on-chain transaction — and historically you had to send it, which meant holding native gas on the destination before you could receive your own money. Gasless mint removes that requirement.

The destination-gas problem

Cross-chain USDC movement with Circle Gateway is a two-sided operation. The burn side happens on your source chains, paid for with gas you already have there. The mint side happens on the destination chain — and someone has to pay that chain's gas to execute it.

For a first-time recipient this is a chicken-and-egg problem. You are moving USDC to a chain precisely because you do not have funds there yet, but the classic flow asks you to already hold that chain's native token to claim the mint. On most testnets that means hunting down a faucet before you can touch your own balance.

On Arc the wrinkle is sharper: Arc uses USDC as its native gas token. So the asset you are trying to receive is the same asset you need to pay for the mint — but you cannot pay with it until it has arrived. Gasless mint cuts that knot.

What gasless mint does

Circle's Forwarding Service is a relayer that completes the destination mint for you. When Oneliq submits your signed burn intent with enableForwarder=true, Circle returns a transferId and takes responsibility for landing the mint on the destination chain. You sign the burn once; Circle pushes the mint. Your wallet never needs to send a transaction on the destination, and never needs gas there.

In Balance, this is the Gasless mint toggle under the recipient field. It is checked by default. The choice maps directly to the useForwarder flag that Oneliq passes into every spend — single-source, single source-chain, and multi-source Unified spends alike.

How it settles, step by step

The flow is the same burn-and-mint plumbing as any Gateway spend, with Circle taking over the final leg.

A concrete example

Mai has 50 USDC in her Unified Balance, deposited earlier from Base Sepolia. She just spun up a brand-new wallet on Arc Testnet to try a dApp there, and wants to move 20 USDC into it. The catch: that Arc wallet is empty — 0 gas — and on Arc gas is USDC, the very thing she's trying to receive.

With gasless mint on, Mai signs a single burn intent on Base Sepolia. Circle's forwarder mints the USDC onto Arc for her and covers the Arc gas itself. Her Arc wallet goes from 0 → ~20 USDC, and because that USDC doubles as gas on Arc, she can immediately make her first transaction — no faucet, no detour, no second token. Her remaining Unified Balance is ~30 USDC.

The forwarding fee and spendable balance

The forwarder is not free — it pays destination gas on your behalf and charges a small fee, deducted from the transfer rather than billed separately. Oneliq surfaces it inline while the mint is in flight, so the cost is visible before the USDC lands.

This is separate from another number you'll see in Balance: Spendable cross-chain (after fee headroom). Circle Gateway reserves a per-intent maxFee headroom on each source chain — roughly 1.5 USDC per source — so the spendable figure is your raw balance minus that reserve. The forwarding fee (gasless mint) and the per-intent headroom (Gateway's own minimum) are two different things; both are shown so the amount you can actually move is never a surprise.

When the forwarder doesn't finish

Relayers can be slow, and testnets are noisy. If the forwarder hasn't landed the mint within Oneliq's polling window, the spend is not lost: the attestation is still valid. Oneliq detects the stall and offers a self-mint fallback — you send the gatewayMint yourself with the attestation already in hand (this is the one case where you'd need a little destination gas). In practice the most common "failure" is the forwarder having already minted, in which case the fallback simply confirms the transfer completed.

This mirrors the fallback thinking Circle describes for the Unified Balance Kit: a route can be the default, but the application should always own a graceful path when the preferred route can't complete. Gasless mint is the preferred route; self-mint is the always-available floor underneath it.

Which networks get gas help

Gasless mint applies to spends that land on any of the eight testnets Balance supports as a destination. Wherever the USDC is headed, Circle's Forwarding Service covers that chain's native gas for the mint, so the recipient never has to pre-fund it. Arc is the headline case because its native gas token is USDC, but the same gasless landing works on every chain below.

The benefit is the same everywhere — you receive USDC without first acquiring that chain's gas token — but it's most striking on Arc, where without gasless mint you'd need USDC to receive USDC.

Why this matters on Arc

Arc settles every transaction fee in USDC. That makes it the headline beneficiary of gasless mint: a recipient with an empty Arc wallet can receive USDC from a Gateway spend and immediately have a balance that is also spendable as gas, without ever needing a separate gas token or a faucet round-trip. The first dollar that arrives is the dollar that pays for the next transaction.

For builders, the same property makes onboarding flows dramatically simpler. You can fund a fresh user wallet on Arc — or any of the eight supported testnets — straight from a Unified Balance position, and the user can act on those funds the moment they land. No "please get some gas first" step in the funnel.

Oneliq is a non-custodial frontend currently on testnet networks. Gasless mint is powered by Circle Gateway and its Forwarding Service. Nothing here is real money or financial advice. We don't custody funds; you always retain control of your wallet.