Today @Circle announced the signing of an agreement to acquire @interop_labs team and IP with the deal expected to close in early 2026. The Interop Labs team is extraordinary and their technology in crypto and blockchain infrastructure has been at the forefront of crosschain interoperability for many years. With this move, we will accelerate Circle's roadmap for digital asset interoperability by building on the already widespread usage of CCTP -- in recent months CCTP has handled >50% of all bridged traffic across major bridge providers that Circle tracks. Our goal is to be able to combine liquidity, interoperability and distribution together in powerful ways for asset issuers. We think this can make digital assets more broadly available and useful across every major blockchain ecosystem, supporting application developers and ultimately end-users that want seamless experiences for interacting with the digital asset economy. With @Arc, we have built a new chain that we believe is well optimized for asset issuers -- fast deterministic settlement, stablecoin native fees and FX, seamless USDC liquidity, opt-in privacy and high performance execution. With our expanded interoperability roadmap, we want to ensure that asset issuers on Arc can reach users, apps and ecosystems across the entire blockchain network landscape. We are thrilled to announce this transaction and look forward to bringing over the team and IP. We will share more as we make further progress. https://www.circle.com/blog/circle-signs-agreement-to-acquire-interop-labs-team-intellectual-property(Jeremy Allaire - jda.eth / jdallaire.sol)