Circle has expanded its services portfolio through acquisition of digital token exchange Poloniex promising to enhance customer experience.
Goldman Sachs-backed cryptocurrency startup Circle has announced acquisition of digital token exchange Poloniex which is currently the world’s 14th-largest exchange by 24-hour trading volume. This move was done by Circle with a view to expand the sphere of its activity offering additional support for cryptocurrencies and providing its customers with enhanced services.
Though neither of the companies has disclosed the value of the deal, which is considered to be one of the largest in the industry’s history, an unnamed source familiar with the matter has informed that the firm paid $400 million to acquire Poloniex.
This deal gives Circle opportunity to establish its control over a marketplace having a trade volume of around $1.5 million per day, with around 70 different digital currencies and tokens traded.
Up till now, the company had three main products: a mobile app Circle Pay allowing users to hold, send, and receive traditional fiat currencies; Circle Trade, a provider of crypto asset liquidity; and an upcoming mobile app Circle Invest that will enable users to invest in cryptocurrency markets.
The most profitable company’s project is Circle Trade that handles more than $2 billion per month in cryptocurrency transactions. A minimum deal size is $250,000 while the biggest ones are as high as $200 million. For 3 months from November to January thanks to Circle Trade the company received more than $60 million in revenue. And now Circle will also operate an open global token marketplace.
Created by a team of crypto visionaries, Poloniex was the first exchange to offer cryptocurrency-to-cryptocurrency trading at a large scale, and it was also the first exchange to reach $1 billion in daily volume. Through the company’s platform its customers have traded crypto assets worth billions of dollars.
It is expected that in the nearest future Circle development team will work on improving the infrastructure of Poloniex in terms scalability, reliability, and robustness. As the Circle team reported, they are going to allocate its resources in supporting tokens or crypto assets, and introducing fiat pairs which will enable traders to carry out transactions between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies like the US dollar, Euro and British pound.
In the upcoming years, Circle plans to develop the Poloniex exchange further to include other non-crypto assets, such as physical goods and financial products such as derivatives.
Nevertheless, the team promises to conduct all the changes as smooth as possible maintaining the key features and services of Poloniex that are already familiar and trustworthy for its customers.
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