Blockchain payments app Circle acquires crypto marketplace

Payments app Circle, which is built on blockchain and cryptocurrency assets, has today acquired the global token marketplace Poloniex.

Circle is currently working on its forthcoming Circle Invest app, which will act as a crypto asset investment platform for buying, selling and exchanging alternative currencies. The companies’ mainstay is its Circle Pay app, which allows friends to send money to one another via blockchain technology in USD, EUR and GBP.

Available in over 100 countries worldwide, Poloniex is a leading token marketplace for crypto assets. As the first crypto exchange to reach $1bn in daily volume, customers have now traded crypto assets equating to billions of dollars through Poloniex. The platform now joins Circle to bolster its crypto-trading effort.

Circle has said it plans to scale up Poloniex’s offering through market expansion and localisation, as well as increasing token listings and bolstering its customer service and technical support.

In the future, the payments fintech has said it expects Poloniex’s marketplace to expand beyond crypto assets and into a “multi-sided marketplace” which can support tokens that represent anything of value, such as physical goods, real estate and works of art.

Circle co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire said in a statement: “We believe that the contractual rules around exchange for anything and everything will become increasingly represented in distributed global software, rely on inconvertible distributed shared memory in the form of distributed ledgers, and benefit from the services of global multidimensional marketplaces such as Circle Poloniex.

“The future of the global economy is open, shared, inclusive, far more evenly distributed, and powerful not only for a few chosen gatekeepers, but for all who will connect.”