Circle bought Trigger Finance, a platform that lets retail investors set custom rules for trading and receiving alerts. The acquisition moves the Trigger team to Circle's new headquarters in New York,
Circle bought Trigger Finance, a platform that lets retail investors set custom rules for trading and receiving alerts. The acquisition moves the Trigger team to Circle's new headquarters in New York, where they'll develop investment products for the crypto market.
Trigger Finance won recognition for its approach to investor portfolio management. The platform pulls data from Twitter, economic calendars, SEC filings, weather reports, and other alternative sources. The platform responds to specific conditions by executing trades across different asset classes. The biggest driver of Trigger's growth came from its trigger system for crypto assets, which became the company's fastest-expanding customer segment.
Circle traces its origins to 2013 as a bitcoin exchange and wallet operator. In September 2015, the company earned the first BitLicense from New York's Department of Financial Services. By December 2016, it had abandoned its exchange operations to focus on payments. Today, Circle Pay serves as its flagship offering—a mobile app that lets users move fiat money using crypto and public blockchains as the underlying mechanism.
Founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire announced the acquisition through a blog post. "We plan to continue bringing the world of open money protocols to more people by leveraging our infrastructure and trading operations in the form of new mobile products for individual retail investors," they said. "We're thrilled that the Trigger team now joins us in creating these new products."
Bitcoin achieved a new all-time price high last week. The cryptocurrency jumped 22 percent to $5,800 per coin on Saturday, pushing its total market capitalization above $93 billion according to Coinmarketcap. Iqbal V. Gandham, who heads eToro UK's operations, interpreted the surge as a sign of investor conviction. "This record is an exciting milestone and sign of market confidence in the outlook for Bitcoin and the underlying technology behind the cryptocurrency, blockchain," he said. "We expect many more milestones like this to come."
The total cryptocurrency market now exceeds $175 billion.
Traditional finance firms are moving into crypto. Saxo Bank launched two exchange-traded notes on Nasdaq Stockholm, giving investors exposure to ether—the second-largest cryptocurrency with a $30 billion market capitalization. "We have increasing client demand for exposure to cryptocurrencies and I am very pleased that we can now offer clients exposure to both Bitcoin and Ethereum through Exchange Traded Notes," said Claus Nielsen, head of markets at Saxo Bank. "Cryptocurrency markets are still at an early development stage and we find that listed products like ETNs without leverage, offering high levels of transparency, are good ways to include cryptocurrencies in our multi-asset product offering spanning more than 35,000 instruments. We continue to follow the developments in cryptocurrency markets and expect to able to add more instruments to our offering going forward."
Circle unveiled CENTRE, an open-source project designed to enable interoperability among digital wallets using blockchain technology.
