Circle Then and Now: Bitcoin’s Early Champions Challenge a Blockchain World

By May 2, 2016Bitcoin Business

A brick building in Boston’s Waterfront district might not seem like the most obvious place for a high-tech company, but it’s mix of colonial heritage and gentrified chic are oddly fitting for blockchain payments startup Circle.

Founded in 2013, Circle is positioning itself as an early leader in the race to make blockchain work for online payments – an idea that requires it to straddle both old-world regulations and infrastructure and new technologies that are only now on the cusp of being fully understood.

Many know Circle as a " bitcoin company ", even though its product no longer bears a resemblance to many of its peers. For example, it now allows users 13 years old and over to load money to the app in the US and UK via Visa and MasterCard credit and debit cards. Users can convert funds to bitcoin as well, but the emphasis now is on users who may want to keep those funds in fiat.

As for whether this is a careful pivot in the face of bitcoin’s slower-than-expected adoption or the fruition of long-laid plans is less certain, but Circle’s co-founders Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville assert it’s the latter.

The co-founders are long-time business partners, having worked with each other at online video platform Brightcove, where Neville was a senior software architect and Allaire was chairman. Brightcove went public in February 2012 , and by October 2013, Allaire announced Circle had raised $9m in what was, at the time, the budding sector’s biggest funding round.

Back then, Circle hadn’t even released information about its products and services, but the firm’s focus seemed clear. In an early interview with CoinDesk, Allaire said that Circle wanted to make "payments", as easy as "email [or] Skype" using "digital currency".

Two years later, Allaire and Neville have raised $76m (rumors of […]

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