Circle, a peer-to-peer payments technology startup, has acquired mobile investing platform Trigger Finance. The Trigger Finance team anchors Circle’s new office in New York City, and will help deliver new investment products for crypto assets, the company said.
Trigger Finance is an award-winning investing platform that helps retail investors manage their portfolios through nature language rules and alternative orders. It supports real-time alerts and execution across all asset classes and alternative data sources such as Twitter streams, global economic events, insider and SEC filings, weather and more.
“Triggers” used for tracking events and making investments in crypto assets comprised the fastest growing part of its customer base.
Circle started off as a bitcoin exchange platform and wallet service provider back in 2013. In September 2015, the Boston-based startup was granted the first BitLicense by the New York State Department of Financial Services, although in December 2016 it pivoted away from its bitcoin exchange to focus on payments.
Today, Circle offers a mobile payment platform called Circle Pay that allows users to hold, send and receive conventional currencies. It uses cryptographic assets and public blockchains as payment rails.
“We plan to continue bringing the world of open money protocols to more people by leveraging our infrastructure and trading operations in the form of new mobile products for individual retail investors,” Circle founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire wrote in a blog announcement. “We’re thrilled that the Trigger team now joins us in creating these new products.”
Bitcoin reached a new record high last week, rising 22% to US$5,800 a coin on Saturday with a market capitalization of more than US$93 billion, according to data from Coinmarketcap.com.
“This record is an exciting milestone and sign of market confidence in the outlook for Bitcoin and the underlying technology behind the cryptocurrency, blockchain,” said Iqbal V. Gandham, the managing director at eToro UK, a social trading investment platform. “We expect many more milestones like this to come.”
The overall cryptocurrency market is now worth over US$175 billion. The market continues to attract attention from investors.
Last week, Saxo Bank began enabling investors to get exposure to price movement of ether, the second largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of US$30 billion, via the trading of two new exchange-traded notes on Nasdaq Stockholm.
“We have increasing client demand for exposure to cryptocurrencies and I am very pleased that we can now offer clients exposure to both Bitcoin and Ethereum through Exchange Traded Notes,” said Claus Nielsen, the head of markets of Saxo Bank.
“Cryptocurrency markets are still at an early development stage and we find that listed products like ETNs without leverage, offering high levels of transparency, are good ways to include cryptocurrencies in our multi-asset product offering spanning more than 35,000 instruments.
“We continue to follow the developments in cryptocurrency markets and expect to able to add more instruments to our offering going forward.”
The acquisition of Trigger Finance comes shortly after Circle announced the CENTRE open source project, which seeks to use blockchain technology to allow digital wallet interoperability.