Circle has acquired one of the biggest crypto exchange, Poloniex, which is credited with being the first to give ethereum a market, as well as ethereum classic and countless of other digital currencies and tokens.

Neither said how much was paid for what seems to be one of the biggest acquisition in this space, and perhaps one of the more surprising, but there are rumors of a price tag as high as $400 million.

The merger appears to be part of a holistic vision starting with Circle Invest, a new feature which might begin listing many assets while expanding fiat pairs. Circle says:

“We envision a robust multi-sided 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.

We believe that the contractual rules around exchange for anything and everything will become increasingly represented in distributed global software, rely on inconvertible distributed shared memory in the form of distributed ledgers, and benefit from the services of global multidimensional marketplaces such as Circle Poloniex.”

In effect, they are planning a digital stock market where you can trade all sorts of tokenized goods, bonds, companies, as well as digital currencies.

With the merger taking immediate effects as Circle takes over operations according to Poloniex which in a statement said today:

“Circle will immediately begin working alongside the Poloniex team to address customer support and expand operations so that we can continue to scale effectively going forward.”

This is the biggest acquisition of a crypto exchange as far as we are aware and might bring some competition to Coinbase, which has been leading the way, as well as to perhaps more traditional stock apps that are now moving into this space.

“Circle Pay helps people around the globe connect to one another and share value just as they would share any other kind of content on the open borderless internet; Circle Trade serves institutions and investors as one of the world’s largest providers of crypto asset liquidity; and our forthcoming Circle Invest app enables individuals to tap into crypto asset investment through a simple, seamless, mobile experience,” Circle says.

Goldman Sachs backed Circle was initially focused on mainly bitcoin trading, but the increased backlog at the time led to a pivot of sorts. Now, as the crypto ecosystem expands, they are seemingly targeting a crypto-assets market where you can buy tokenized equity, bonds, and so on.