What a USDC bridge charged on November 10, 2026
What does it cost to move dollars from Ethereum to Base? For USDC sent through Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), the issuer’s own system, the answer at 10:19 UTC on November 10, 2026 came from Circle’s fee API.
| Route | Fast Transfer fee | Standard Transfer fee |
|---|---|---|
| Ethereum to Base | 1 basis point (0.01%) | 0 |
| Base to Ethereum | 1.3 basis points | 0 |
On $10,000 the fast route from Ethereum costs $1. What it buys is time. Circle’s finality page puts a fast transfer leaving Ethereum at about 20 seconds, after two blocks, against 15 to 19 minutes for a standard one, which waits for finality. From Linea a standard transfer takes 6 to 32 hours. Fast transfers draw on a global allowance that Circle keeps to cover the risk of a chain reorganization.
Lock, burn or swap
Ethereum.org’s bridges page names three common ways to move value. A bridge can lock coins on the source chain and mint stand-ins on the destination, burn them on one side and mint fresh ones on the other, or arrange an atomic swap with someone holding the asset there already.
CCTP is the burn-and-mint kind. USDC is destroyed on the sending chain and Circle’s contracts create new USDC on the receiving one, which Circle says works “without traditional bridge liquidity pools.” A lock-and-mint bridge leaves you holding a wrapped token, a claim on coins sitting in the bridge’s contract.
Who checks the transfers
Ethereum.org also sorts bridges by who verifies them. Trusted bridges rely on an outside group of verifiers, such as a multisig, while trustless ones lean only on the chains they connect. Native bridges, such as the Arbitrum Bridge built to move funds from Ethereum to that layer 2, form another group on its list.
Thefts on the public record
Ethereum.org notes that bridges account for the top three biggest hacks in decentralized finance. In a release of August 8, 2022, the US Treasury said more than $96 million from the June 24, 2022 Harmony Bridge heist and at least $7.8 million from the August 2, 2022 Nomad heist had been laundered through the mixer Tornado Cash.
The FBI later named the thief in the Harmony case. In a statement of January 23, 2023 it said North Korea’s Lazarus Group, also called APT38, stole $100 million from Harmony’s Horizon bridge, and that on January 13, 2023 North Korean actors used the privacy protocol RAILGUN to launder over $60 million of that ether. The FBI listed the bitcoin addresses where the remaining funds had gone.
The mistake people make
Treating a bridged coin as identical to the original is the common slip. A wrapped coin is worth what the bridge holds behind it, and ethereum.org warns that “we have seen wrapped versions of tokens exploited.” Before you bridge, check who issues the token on the far side, the stablecoin company itself or the bridge.