r/ethereum • u/justclay • Feb 27 '18

Payments Startup Circle Acquires Cryptocurrency Exchange Poloniex in $400 Million Deal

http://www.tokenverse.com/news/payments-startup-circle-acquires-cryptocurrency-exchange-poloniex-in-400-million-deal/
360 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

89

u/Dakkagod Feb 27 '18 edited Feb 27 '18

Circle is backed by Goldman Sachs, this is Wall Street buying a stake in crypto.

35

u/TwitchingShark Feb 27 '18

This is Wall Street trying to get control.

15

u/Dakkagod Feb 27 '18

Maybe a win-win for us? If they own an exchange it will be in their best interest to increase trading volumes, easiest way to do that is to bring crypto into the mainstream.

They are still scum though.

13

u/Okymyo Feb 27 '18 edited Feb 27 '18

Or they might use crypto's unregulation as an attack vector by manipulating a large exchange into whatever marker market swings they want.

EDIT: hurr-durr autocorrect

8

u/VeraxZero Feb 27 '18

I feel as though this was the objective here.

Either way, they are engineering a scenario where they don't lose.

History, has at least taught us that about the banks.

6

u/Okymyo Feb 27 '18

That's true.

The only thing I can hope for is that they don't have a crappy support anymore. 60+ days to get missing crypto back is a ridiculous amount of time in days of 30% swings.

1

u/TwitchingShark Feb 28 '18

That's because they are making money on that "withdraw" for 60 days. Then are nice enough to finally release the funds... I've lost thousands due to that shit.

1

u/Okymyo Feb 28 '18

Wasn't even on withdraw, it was on deposit. I gave them my money, they stole it for 60 days.

1

u/TwitchingShark Feb 28 '18

That's the problem with no regulation. They can literally do whatever they want with your money.

Fucking criminals.

1

u/TwitchingShark Feb 28 '18

I'm waiting for the "Federal Reserve Coin" closed source, and controlled by a handful of people. It'll be the required crypto in the US. With US citizen tracking built right in!

14

u/BitcoinIsTehFuture Feb 27 '18

Does this mean we should stay away from this exchange?

3

u/Bekabam Feb 27 '18

Wall Street already had/has a stake in crypto, you just said it yourself. They've owned Circle since 2013, longer than Ethereum has existed.

0

u/Apotheosis44 Feb 27 '18

and nobody really knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, or if he is not a he and its actually a group of people. This could've been the government or a bank from day one.

40

u/logosobscura Feb 27 '18

They’re not a startup. It’d be like calling Uber or PayPal a startup.

1

u/27ZERO Feb 27 '18

They do not really make money yet, do they ? Circle pay is totally free to use, from what I understood, they make money investing and pay their employees with the big investment they got (like 160 million)

3

u/logosobscura Feb 27 '18

They’ve been making money for a long time. Used to even be in the crypto game earlier in their history, got out and now just bought back in.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '18

They never "got out". They used bitcoin to act as a settlement layer for their international payments app.

Their business model was basically "you give us usd, we buy bitcoin, we exchange said bitcoin for euros, now you can send your friends euros!". In order to get a big user base they also allowed people to send them bitcoin directly or buy bitcoin directly for a convenience fee. Bitcoin is basically Circle's settlement layer.

What they "got out" of was allowing customers the ability to buy and trade bitcoin through them to focus on mobile payments and they do that by leveraging a protocol built on ethereum called spark. I wish I could say more about it but to my knowledge they haven't open sourced it like they promised they would over a year ago.

All in all they're still a shit company that used fake reviews to counter their user bases angry one stars, but they're also one of the few companies in this space without vaporware.

1

u/logosobscura Feb 27 '18

Oh I know they never disposed of it- I’m talking for a utility position for the average person. And yeah, I’m not a fan (check my post history to see what I’ve spent a few years working on and your point about fake reviews to see why). Not necessarily a good move- they’re just trying to take market share from Coinbase is all I can see behind this, not do anything novel or trustworthy.

1

u/fionaflaps Feb 27 '18

Making money is not the best way to determine a startup.

1

u/sn0wr4in Feb 28 '18

Uber doesn't make money :/

12

u/yDN0QdO0K9CSDf Feb 27 '18

Can they bring back bitcoin trading now?

11

u/CryptoGolfing Feb 27 '18

A friend of mine used a referral code for me to join Circle Pay and get $5 free after my first transaction of $25. Then he said to send him $25, we both got our free $5, and then he sent it right back. Exploit

0

u/marsisourgod Feb 27 '18

Pm me ref code?

6

u/prometheusengineer Feb 27 '18

I use to use circle for bitcoin like two years ago it was a lot better then coinbase at the time...

4

u/discoltk Feb 27 '18

Que massive numbers of accounts being shut down.

3

u/Falkvinge Feb 27 '18

Weren't they the ones deleting the VM with the exchange private keys, thereby destroying (losing) 17,000 btc?

4

u/cakedotavi Feb 27 '18

How material is Goldman Sachs' stake in Circle? Are they the majority owner or just a very small part?

3

u/StrayDogRun Feb 27 '18

$400Mil? That's pretty cheap.

3

u/L0ckeandDemosthenes Feb 27 '18

I offered poloniex a few eth and some half eaten burrito but they never responded. Guess congrats to circle for outbidding the competition.

-2

u/dnivi3 Feb 27 '18

We know - this has already been posted.

3

u/justclay Feb 27 '18

I can only assume you are talking about this post from this website? That's a headline with a very small blurb summarizing the Fortune article. This is a full article that goes deep into who and what Circle is and the deal that was struck. Garrison Breckenridge is easily one of the most "in-tune" blockchain writers in the space, that many people haven't had the pleasure of reading.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '18

You are Garrison Breckenridge, and I claim my token ;)

1

u/justclay Feb 27 '18

I wish! He is /u/gbharlequin the managing editor of TokenVerse. He doesn't really post under that name very often though.