The Boston-based payments company Circle has purchased the U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, Circle Founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire announced in a blog post yesterday.
A person familiar with the terms of the deal who was not authorized to speak about it told Fortune that the value of the deal is roughly $400 million.
Poloniex has grown to become one of the world’s leading token marketplaces available in over one hundred countries. It was the first exchange to reach $1 billion in daily volume, one of the first exchanges in the world to offer meaningful liquidity in ethereum and it has has hosted a broad variety of carefully selected tokens. Customers have traded crypto assets equating to billions of dollars through its platform.
Circle allows people to essentially text each other money with no fees and no borders. The company, which is backed by $140 million in venture capital, also serves institutions and investors as one of the world’s largest providers of crypto asset liquidity and is developing an invest app that will enable individuals to tap into crypto asset investment.
“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, and we learned that we share a similar perspective on the future as well as the same sharp sense of urgency about immediate needs and challenges,” Neville and Allaire wrote in the blog post. “Poloniex addresses another key element of Circle’s product foundation: An open global token marketplace.”
The two founders said the company will first address customer support and scale risk, compliance and technical operations to bolster the existing Poloniex product and platform.
Next, Neville and Allaire wrote they plan to focus on 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 investment products.
“In the coming years, we expect to grow the Poloniex platform beyond its current incarnation as an exchange for only crypto assets,” the two founders wrote. “We envision a robust multisided 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.”
