Circle Saw $24 Bn in Trading Volume 2018

Circle, the OTC (over-the-counter) trading desk, saw $24 billion worth of trading volumes in 2018. According to its official Medium blog post, the company saw 10,000 over-the-counter trades involving 600 different counter parties and spanning 36 assets.

Core Liquidity Provider

Circle claims that it has now become the core liquidity provider for the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem and its clientele includes founders, miners, hedge funds, crypto funds, venture capitalists as well as proprietary trading companies.

According to its post, Circle stated that despite a rocky year for the industry as a whole, the company has continued to expand, onboarding a record number of institutional investors. The company has now grown its OTC trading operations to cover the US, Europe as well as Asia with 24/7 trading coverage.

Thanks to significant growth in several of their product offerings, Circle now has more than 1000 institutional investors from across the globe. In fact, the company’s headcount has also grown exponentially, boasting over 150 new employees now.

Growing Circle

Besides its successful OTC trading desk, Circle also acquired Poloniex in the first part of 2018. Poloniex is one of the oldest crypto exchanges and has been in operation for more than 5 years now.

Circle then upgraded its newly acquired crypto exchange from a regulatory as well as technology perspective, including overhauling the customer sign-up as well as the identity verification processes.

Circle also launched Circle Invest in the spring of 2018, a frictionless way in which cryptos could be invested in. Circle Invest started with one collection of crypto assets called The Market, however, due to the demand, the company launched another three collections of crypto assets. Despite extreme market volatility, the success of Circle Invest can be seen in the fact that more than 30% of the investments are recurring purchases.

Circle expanded its reach even further after the company bought over SeedInvest, the largest equity crowdfunding platform in the US. SeedInvest also has its own registered broker-dealer. This acquisition, however, is still pending approvals from regulators.

OTC Trading in Cryptos

OTC trading lets investors trade directly with one another without having to utilize the services of intermediaries such as crypto exchanges. Institutional investors, who have been wary of trading on cryptocurrency exchanges are now increasing making use of OTC trading desks such as those offered by Circle and Coinbase.

According to reports, institutional investors have moved to the higher liquidity Bitcoin OTC trading markets.