mobile payments app circle acquires crypto exchange poloniex for 400 mln

[Cordillerabit]

Multi-currency money-sending app Circle has announced today, Feb. 26, that they have acquired major US-based cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex for $400 mln, Fortune reports.

Earlier this month, Cointelegraph had covered previously unconfirmed rumors that this acquisition was set to soon take place.

Goldman Sachs-funded Circle is made up of three parts: Circle Pay for fiat transfers, Circle Trade as a liquidity provider of cryptocurrencies, and the upcoming Circle Invest, an app that will allow retail customers to invest in crypto markets.

The Poloniex exchange offers trades in 68 different coins, and is currently the 14th largest crypto exchange by 24-hour volume on CoinMarketCap, trading a total of almost $140 million today to press time.

In today’s 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. Secondly,

“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, Neville and Allaire write that they plan on growing the Poloniex platform into more than a crypto-only exchange, writing that they 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.”

Poloniex’s press release echoed Circle’s sentiments, writing that they are looking forward

“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.”

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