Goldman-Backed Circle Buys Digital Exchange Poloniex

Re:Goldman-Backed Circle Buys Digital Exchange Poloniex by JustAnotherPat on Monday February 26, 2018 @01:32PM (#16467687)

Serious question: How does Circle afford a $400 million price tag when they've only raised $135 million? Their main product seems to be a Venmo clone, complete with the lack of fees. Surely, they're not making that much money selling user data.

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Re:Goldman-Backed Circle Buys Digital Exchange Poloniex by dgacmu on Monday February 26, 2018 @02:12PM (#16468060)

Stock deal. Circle got $135m cash on a valuation higher than that. (480m in 2016: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-24/circle-in...)

So they're probably buying Polo for X shares of Circle, where X depends on their current undisclosed valuation. But it's probably a pretty big chunk of their total.

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Re:Goldman-Backed Circle Buys Digital Exchange Poloniex by icey on Monday February 26, 2018 @02:08PM (#16468028)

My guess is that equity in Circle was part of the purchase price -- hard to know for sure since the terms weren't announced, but this probably wasn't an all-cash deal.

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Re:Goldman-Backed Circle Buys Digital Exchange Poloniex by tomasien on Monday February 26, 2018 @03:30PM (#16468704)

Circle's main product is an OTC crypto trading desk which has been killing it. They move huge volumes for big players.

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Re:Goldman-Backed Circle Buys Digital Exchange Poloniex by nnx on Monday February 26, 2018 @08:18PM (#16470417)

TIL that Circle pivoted into OTC, there's no mention of it on their main https://circle.com where they had the previous product running.

https://www.circletrade.com/ and simple searches do not give much information.

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Re:Goldman-Backed Circle Buys Digital Exchange Poloniex by tomasien on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @02:37PM (#16477069)

Yeah they're keeping their old products running, hoping to be a full service bank for crypto. The OTC desk is where the money is.

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Re:Goldman-Backed Circle Buys Digital Exchange Poloniex by xenity7 on Monday February 26, 2018 @01:35PM (#16467722)

Circle also has a profitable crypto prop trading arm.

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