Circles Transfer and Rule of Trust

This guide will help you understand balances, send limits, and how the Pathfinder finds a route

When you open the Circles tab in the Gnosis app, you’ll typically see:

• Total Circles balance (e.g., 8,602 CRC)

• A Send flow that shows a Send limit (e.g., only 6,800 CRC available to send to a specific person)

That difference is expected. Your total balance is not the same as what’s routable to a specific recipient at this moment.

Everyone creates their own Circles

In Circles, every person mints their own unique CRC (their “personal currency”).

So your wallet’s total “CRC balance” is usually a mix of CRC issued by many different people, not only the CRC you personally minted.

For example, your total might include:

• some Gnosis Group Circles (gCRC)

• your own minted CRC

• and other people’s CRC

The Rule of Trust

The most important rule is the Rule of Trust:

If Alice trusts Bob, then anyone holding Bob’s CRC can swap it 1:1 for any CRC currently held by Alice (whatever Alice holds at that moment).

What does this imply?

• Trust is not just “permission to receive.”

• It creates swap capacity that others can use to move value across the network.

• Transfers can become transitive (they can hop through trust relationships).

Why you can’t always send your full balance to someone?

Your ability to send CRC to a specific recipient depends on two things together:

1. Trust relationships across the network (who trusts whom)

2. Current distribution of CRC holdings (who is holding which people’s CRC)

So even if you have 8,602 CRC total, the network might only be able to route 6,800 CRC from you to that particular recipient right now.

Total balance = what you have

Send limit = what the network can currently route to that person through trust + available intermediate balances

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How Circles finds the sendable amount (Max Flow routing)?

Under the hood, Circles models the routing problem as a maximum flow problem (a well-known graph algorithm problem).

• The network is a graph:

  • nodes = people/accounts

  • edges = trust relationships + swap possibilities created by who holds whose CRC

• The solver searches through many possible combinations to compute:

  • the maximum amount that can be delivered to a chosen recipient

Checking routes and limits with Pathfinder Pro App (Advanced Users Only)

If you want to see the “power tool” version of the routing calculation, use Pathfinder Pro:

1. Navigate to pathfinder.app.aboutcircles.com

2. Paste your address in the sender field

3. Paste the recipient’s address in the recipient field

4. Set Amount to a high number (to probe the maximum)

5. Click Find a path

6. Pathfinder returns the maximum sendable amount — this should match what the Gnosis app shows as the send limit

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Practical tips

• Your total balance being higher than your send limit is normal.

• Send limits vary by recipient. You may be able to send more to one person than another.

• Send limits change over time as:

  • trust links change

  • people’s holdings change

  • routing opportunities appear/disappear