Studies have shown that high levels of Wnt activation can lead to de novo enhancer–promoter chromatin loops during differentiation (Guo et al. 2021) and that CTCF expression is correlated with that of key Wnt pathway genes in gastric cancer (Liu et al. 2021), but the specific role of CTCF in Wnt signaling, in particular concerning CTCF's ability to regulate the 3D genome, is not well understood. Here, CTCF is linked to gastric cancer.