CirBTC borrowing on Morpho hits $190 million as USDC liquidity runs thin

Institutions apparently wanted to borrow against their Bitcoin without selling it. They wanted it badly enough to drain nearly every spare dollar from the pool built for the job. About 97.4% of the USDC supplied to the main cirBTC/USDC market on Morpho is now borrowed. When Circle Mint opened access on Sept. 21, that figure was 8.1%. Three weeks later, the room is almost full. From quiet launch to near capacity As of Oct. 13, 2026, the flagship cirBTC/USDC market on Circle’s Arc Layer-1 held $195 million in supplied USDC. Of that, $190 million had been borrowed. Circle launched cirBTC on Sept. 21 as a token backed 1:1 by Bitcoin. It is built for a product Circle calls Digital Asset-Backed Borrowing, or DABB. Eligible institutional Circle Mint customers can post cirBTC as collateral. They can then borrow USDC that lands directly in their Mint balances. The lending runs through Morpho markets on both Arc and Ethereum. Collateral is not the constraint. More than $304 million in cirBTC currently backs these borrowing operations. The bottleneck is the dollars on the other side of the table. The squeeze is not limited to the headline market either. Smaller individual cirBTC/USDC markets ...