Goldman Sachs-backed Circle had doubled its minimum bitcoin trade size to $500,000 despite a drop in currency values across the market.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, said in an interview with Business Insider that block trades made by its over-the-counter trading desk, Circle Trade, had increased since the start of the year. It has also doubled its minimum cryptocurrency trades from $250,000 to $500,000.
Allaire said that ‘the minimum ticket size has moved up to $500,000 with an average of $1 million,’ while some transactions are greater than $100 million.
This move from Circle comes at a time when market prices have been experiencing a tough start to the year. The first quarterog 2018 saw the worst three months for bitcoin, making it is second worst quarter in its history. After seeing a near $20,000 at the end of December, bitcoin is currently trading at $8,942, according to CoinMarketCap. The market cap for all the digital currencies combined is now worth more than $400.5 billion, a far cry from the $813 billion at the beginning of January.
Despite this, though, ‘the market is robust’ for Circle.
Not only that, but the company is expanding too. In a report from Bloomberg last month it stated that the company was hiring 100 new staff as it expands newly acquired Poloniex, a cryptocurrency exchange. According to Allaire, the firm will hire 25 to 35 people to expand its Asia operations, adding 10 to its staff in Hong Kong and mainland China. It will also be setting up teams in South Korea and Japan.
At the time, Allaire said in an interview that:
The long-term view is that every form of value on the planet will become a crypto token. 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.
Circle, which trades around $2 billion in digital currency a month, is planning to scale the business at Poloniex by bringing it to new markets, increasing the number of tokens on the platform, and enabling fiat-to-crypto transactions.
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