Circle, the Boston-based payments app backed by Goldman Sachs, has bought Poloniex, the U.S. cryptocurrency exchange. For weeks, industry observers had been debating whether the deal would happen. Tod
Circle, the Boston-based payments app backed by Goldman Sachs, has bought Poloniex, the U.S. cryptocurrency exchange. For weeks, industry observers had been debating whether the deal would happen. Today's announcement ends that speculation.
Fortune reported the acquisition price at around $400 million. Poloniex, which opened in 2014, has grown into one of the largest cryptocurrency token marketplaces. The exchange operates in more than 100 countries and became the first crypto exchange to handle $1 billion in daily trading volume.
Circle launched in 2013 as a peer-to-peer payment application using blockchain technology for instant money transfers. The company offered a bitcoin wallet where users could buy and sell bitcoin, though it stopped providing that service in December 2016. In 2015, Circle received a BitLicense from the New York State Department of Financial Services, becoming the first company to obtain that license.
Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire, who founded Circle, said the company plans to scale up Poloniex through geographic expansion and an increased selection of tradable tokens. "We look forward to scaling Poloniex up and out through market expansion and localisation, 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," the founders said.
Neville and Allaire outlined a vision for Poloniex beyond its current form as a cryptocurrency-only exchange. "We envision a 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," they said.
Poloniex released a statement to its user base after the acquisition announcement. The exchange said it would maintain the features that made it popular with traders while ensuring user accounts remained secure. "Your funds will remain safe and access to account functionality uninterrupted throughout," Poloniex said.
