Just 4 hours ago a huge announcement came from the US based Bitcoin exchange Poloniex saying:

“POLONIEX JOINS CIRCLE. We are excited to announce that as of today, February 26, Poloniex will be joining the Circle team and building on our foundations to further scale our platform, grow our global reach, and accelerate the token ecosystem in the months and years ahead.”

Poloniex, a once leading Bitcoin and Altcoin exchange, has been around the scene from 2014. They managed to live through a major hack with pride, repaying every customer, however lately many people moved away from Polo and started to use new exchanges such as Binance or KuCoin for various reasons. Poloniex seemed to have some problems with their customer service and server load during the recent boom and they also stopped listing new and promising projects thus letting down the altcoin hungry crowd.

The buyer is Circle, a cryptocurrency focused financial-services firm, which is going achieve additional influence and a bigger crowd with this move. They operate Circle Trade, one of the worlds biggest “over the counter” trading desks for cryptocurrencies. They handle more than $2 billion a month in cryptocurrency transactions. The most interesting part of this whole setup is that Circle is backed by no other than Goldman Sachs according to Reuters. There is no official information about the price Polo was sold for, however Fortune magazine said the deal was worth about $400 million. Whatever the price was, this is going to be a really interesting in every aspect and we hope that this means more competition for the top exchanges in the near future. We are looking forward to dig out more details. Stay tuned!