It may have started as a Bitcoin wallet but veteran entrepreneur Jeremy Allaire’s fintech startup Circle has since shifted focus to social payments, launching an app in Q4 last year that lets users send U.S. dollars to settle IOUs between each other, with its pitch being it makes payments as easy as firing off an SMS (and perhaps cheaper, given there’s no fees involved for Circle users).
And while fiat currency payments are now evidently the focal point for its business (rather than Bitcoin payments), Circle does still offer the ability to feelessly pay people elsewhere in the world, in some 150 countries — and for that it needs to loop Bitcoin into the mix, turning dollar payments into BTCs deposited into the recipient’s Bitcoin wallet.
But Allaire prefers to talk now about the other, more fashionable ‘b’ word — blockchain — asserting that Circle is utilizing blockchain technology to “build a model for money that works over the open Internet”.
“We never thought of ourselves as a Bitcoin startup. The media certainly classified us that way because we were involved with the technology. From the day we founded the company three years ago we’ve focused on trying to build a new consumer finance company. And one that makes money work the way the Internet works,” he tells TechCrunch.
“We want… to connect the benefits of digital currency with the existing financial system. And the existing currencies that people use, day to day, the currencies they’re paid in, the currencies they pay people with etc, and connect that not just with blockchain technology but other major technical innovations that make doing what we do possible.”
“When people use the Circle product… you don’t see Bitcoins. It’s sort of underneath. The blockchain is a technology that allows us to not just build another closed payments […]
