The EOS token, the cryptocurrency token of the EOSIO open source blockchain protocol, has been added into cryptocurrency trading platform Poloniex. EOS deposits and withdrawals are currently live and trading in EOS/USDT, EOS/BTC, and EOS/ETH pairs will be enabled on August 1, 2018, Circle said on Tuesday.
“Since acquiring Poloniex five months ago, we’ve primarily focused on improving the core product experience and stabilizing the performance of the exchange,” Circle, the payments startup and the owner of Poloniex, said in a blog announcement.
“We improved deposit and withdrawal reliability, updated our customer onboarding process and cleared over 175,000 legacy support tickets. We are now also investing in new ways to grow Poloniex into a premiere destination for crypto asset trading — the addition of EOS is just the first step.”
Circle said Poloniex is only supporting EOS mainnet tokens at the time and will not be accepting deposits of the ERC20 variant or providing conversion to mainnet tokens. Poloniex will also not be supporting EOS airdrops for the time being.
EOS tokens grant access to bandwidth and storage on the EOSIO decentralized operating system, which aims to support industrial-scale applications and claims to eliminate transaction fees and be capable of conducting millions of transactions per second.
Block.one, the company building EOSIO, raised US$4 billion in a year-long token sale to fund the development of the platform. Following the token sale for the ERC20 EOS token on the Ethereum blockchain, EOS has been live on its own blockchain since June 14.
Circle acquired Poloniex in February in a bid to become “the US’s first regulated crypto exchange,” which will support “all forms of emerging crypto tokens, including tokens that would be deemed securities,” according to leaked documents. Circle didn’t disclose the amount it paid for Poloniex but a report from Fortune suggests it to be about US$400 million.
Boston-based Circle is a payments technology company founded in 2013. Besides Poloniex, Circle offers several other products including Circle Pay, a mobile app that allows users to hold, send, and receive fiat currencies, Circle Trade, an over-the-counter digital asset trading platform for institutions and large investors, and Circle Invest, a cryptocurrency investment platform with a recurring buys feature.
Circle received its BitLicense from the New York State Department of Financial Services in 2015 and launched a Bitcoin blockchain-based remittance and messaging application called CENTRE, formerly known as Spark, in December 2016.
Circle has raised a total of US$246 million in funding so far, its latest being a US$110 million Series E led by Bitmain.