Cryptocurrency Exchange Poloniex was Bought for $400 mln

A cryptocurrency-focused financial-services firm, Circle, acquired on 26 February one of the most famous on the financial market cryptocurrency exchanges, Poloniex, for $400 mln. This step turned Circle into one of the most powerful and influential businesses in the crypto market.

“We look 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,” - Poloniex’s press release stated.

The Circle company includes three equal subdivisions: Circle Pay for fiat  transfers,  Circle Trade as a liquidity provider of digital currencies, and the upcoming Circle Invest, an app that will enable retailers to invest in cryptocurrency markets.

The Poloniex fintech system offers the ability to make transactions using 68 different trading coins. It is considered the 14th largest crypto exchange by 24-hour volume, according to CoinMarketCap.

Details

Circle co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire clarified in the statement on the company’s official blog that the first step for Circle is to address customer support and the technical side needed to support the Poloniex platform. And then:

“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 perspective, Neville and Allaire claimed that they had plans to develop the Poloniex platform into something more than just a crypto exchange, writing what they were seriously thinking about next:

“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.”

The Other Side of the Deal

It is interesting to mention, that the real reason for the owner changing process is quite different from the official statements. Nathaniel Popper, New York Times journalist, recently posted on his Twitter page the following information:

This evidences that the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States (SEC) agreed not to take legislative measures against the American cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex under the condition that it is bought by the Bitcoin-startup Circle.