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Dublin fintech firm Circle has confirmed the purchase of the US-based Poloniex exchange in a deal estimated at $400m.
Just under a year ago, Dublin-based peer-to-peer payments platform Circle announced that it was to double its workforce, with ambitions to serve the 500m-plus EU consumer market.
Now it has turned Stateside, with confirmation that it has acquired Boston-based cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex in a deal, which, Circle said in a blogpost, would give its platform access to an open global token marketplace.
While no figure was announced by the company, Fortune estimates that the deal is worth close to $400m and will likely see it directly compete with one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, Coinbase.
Available in more than 100 countries worldwide, Poloniex was one of the first exchanges in the world to offer liquidity in Ethereum and was the first exchange to reach $1bn in daily volume.
“We’ve been privileged to get to know and collaborate with the Poloniex founders and their teams over the past several months as we contemplated this union and completed extensive due diligence together,” Circle co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire said.
“In the coming years, we expect to grow the Poloniex platform beyond its current incarnation as an exchange for only crypto assets.”
The pair continued: “We 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.”
Driving Circle’s growth in the past few years has been its Circle Trade platform, which already handles more than $2bn in cryptocurrency transactions each month, with deals ranging from $250,000 to as high as $200m.
Last October, the company revealed a new payment service allowing for users to ‘beam’ cash from Circle into a US bank account with zero waiting and zero fees.
