Circle co-founder Sean Neville and chief executive Jeremy Allaire disclosed in a blog post on their website that they have bought the Crypto Exchange Poloniex. Although it was not exposed who much they paid for the acquisition, we gathered from Fortune that it might be around $400 million.
Poloniex has been one of the big players in crypto exchanges, but current competitions are having a toll on them. For instance, Poloniex has fallen behind exchanges such as Bittrex and Binance in the passing months. So it is understood why the company sold itself. But what does Circle have in plans for Poloniex?
Well, since its inception in 2013, Circle has been shifting its agenda. Primarily it seemed like they had aimed to be the PayPal of BitCoin and digital currencies. You could have used the platform to buy or sell bitcoins without delving inside complicated technical know-how.
Shortly after, the company called itself as a social payment company and didn’t want to be weighted down solely by bitcoins and blockchains. They even removed such words from their official website. In 2016, CEO Jeremy Allaire gave an insight to how he perceived their company:
“We never thought of ourselves as a Bitcoin startup. The media certainly classified us that way because we were involved with the technology. From the day we founded the company three years ago we’ve focused on trying to build a new consumer finance company. And one that makes money work the way the Internet works.”
And now, the acquisition of Poloniex make things rather confusing. All it shows is that the company has no intention to confine themselves to a single niche and explore different opportunities. Regardless, the company hopes to leverage Poloniex to become a “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”.