Poloniex Has Been Bought by Circle company backed by Goldman Sachs
Internet Financial, a mobile payments company Circle had bought major US-based cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex for $400 mln. Poloniex ranked as the 14th largest crypto exchange by CoinMarketCap.com. It says on its website that the U.S.-based company was formed in January 2014 by Tristan D’Agosta Founder and Chief Executive Officer.
Who is Circle and why did they buy Poloniex ?
One of the most well-funded blockchain startups, its investors include Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) and Baidu Inc (BIDU.O).
Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle’s mobile payment platform, Circle Pay, allows users to hold, send, and receive traditional fiat currencies
Circle’s mobile app lets people make instant money transfers. The company also has a trading operation. It handles about $2 billion in crypto trading a month with large institutional buyers and sellers. Minimum order size for the traditional side of the business is $250,000. Circle is also working on a mobile app that will let people easily invest in crypto assets.
In an announcement on the Circle blog, Circle co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire wrote that the first step for Circle is to address customer support and the technical side needed to support the Poloniex platform.
“We also look forward to scaling Poloniex up and out through market expansion and localization, increasing token listings where possible and appropriate, and exploring the fiat USD, EUR, and GBP connectivity that Circle already brings to its compliant Pay, Trade, and Invest products.”
In the future, their vision is on growing the Poloniex platform into more than a crypto-only exchange
“Robust multi-sided distributed marketplace that can host tokens which represent everything of value: physical goods, fundraising and equity, real estate, creative productions such as works of art, music and literature, service leases and time-based rentals, credit, futures, and more.”
Poloniex released a statement about promising partnership
“To bringing Circle’s experience to increase the scalability and reliability of our platform and operations. User experience is paramount. If we aspire to build a token marketplace that will change the fundamentals of global value exchange, we cannot settle for anything less than excellence in our product.”
In the last year or so, newer entrants such as Binance and Kucoin largely eclipsed exchanges such as Bittrex and Poloniex. This partnership could help Poloniex regain its former glory.