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Reuters
According to reports, on Tuesday, Circle, a digital currency financial payment company known as Alipay of the United States, announced the completion of a US$110 million Series E financing, which raised its valuation from US$480 million in 2016 to nearly US$3 billion. The round of financing was led by Bitmain, with Accel, Blockchain Capital, Breyer, DCG, General Catalyst, IDG, Pantera, and Tusk Ventures as followers.
In addition, Circle said that its subsidiary CENTER will issue a new token linked to the price of the U.S. dollar this summer. The token is called Circle USD Coin (USDC), which will be the first token backed by U.S. dollar reserves.
The world-renowned miner Bitmain will also participate in CENTER investment and help issue USDC.
Circle plans to incorporate USDC into the existing Circle Pay and Circle Trade services, and will also launch Poloniex, an American digital currency exchange acquired last year. As a stable currency backed by the U.S. Reserve, USDC is one of Circle’s CENTER’s plans.
Circle believes that a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a stable traditional currency can help drive the adoption of blockchain systems.
Founded in 2013, Circle is a consumer finance start-up company that provides digital currency storage and national currency exchange services, headquartered in Boston, USA. Currently, Circle has 7 million users and handles more than $1 billion in encrypted assets every month.
Since its inception, the company has been favored by capital, with investors in previous rounds of financing including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Baidu Inc. and investment bank China International Capital Corp.
In October last year, Circle launched a wholly-owned subsidiary CENTER and raised $20 million to build an Ethereum payment network. The strategic layout includes legal currency exchange services, wallet companies, and anti-money laundering, KYC and other services. Want to realize a cross-wallet, cross-currency global asset transfer network.
Following the acquisition of the US digital currency exchange Poloniex last year, which expanded the OTC trading of encrypted assets to the on-site market, the issuance of USDC is also a step in its commercial landscape.
USDC is an ERC20 token based on the Ethereum network, which can be used to pay transaction fees, intermediary currency for cross-currency conversion, transactions or collateral assets for intervening in platform service providers, etc.
