Goldman-Backed Crypto Startup Circle to Hire 100 Employees, Expand into Asia
The U.S. labor market is on firm footing as jobless claims decline in the week ended May 11. | Source: Shutterstock
Fintech startup Circle said that it will hire 100 employees to expand into Asia and improve operations at Poloniex, its recently-acquired cryptocurrency exchange.
The Dublin-registered firm, which has received funding from both Goldman Sachs and Chinese tech conglomerate Baidu, will use many of these new hires to improve customer support and operations at Poloniex, which Circle reportedly acquired for $400 million in one of the largest deals in the industry’s history.
At present, the US-based Poloniex ranks as the 14th-largest cryptocurrency exchange, as measured by daily trading volume. In the past 24 hours, Poloniex has processed nearly $180 million worth of trades, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Other new employees will devote their efforts toward helping Circle’s institutional trading desk — Circle Trade, which manages about $4 billion in volume per month — begin processing trades in Asian fiat currencies. About one-third of the new hires will be stationed in offices spread throughout mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan, Bloomberg reports.
Circle has big plans for Poloniex. In a statement announcing the acquisition, the firm said that it plans to turn the exchange into “an open global token marketplace” that can “host tokens which represent everything of value,” ranging from equity to works of art and literature.
“The long-term view is that every form of value on the planet will become a crypto token,” Circle co-founder Jeremy Allaire told Bloomberg during an interview. “We want to offer more markets, more assets, we want to localize it, and launch it in more international markets and, critically, we need to work with the most important regulators,” he said, referring to the exchange.
As CCN.com reported, Circle also recently launched a cryptocurrency investing app — Circle Invest — that provides retail investor with commission-free trading for five cryptocurrencies and has pricing similar to that of the firm’s institutional desk.
Meanwhile, Coinbase — whose dominant role in the Western retail market Circle is seeking to supplant — announced Wednesday that it had received an e-money license in the UK and had become the first cryptocurrency exchange to land a UK bank account. Coinbase also revealed that it plans to increase its London-based team by a factor of eight by the end of the year as it increases its European presence.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
