Since it has failed to become a meaningful part of its business, U.S.-based Circle Internet Financial Ltd will no longer allow customers to buy and sell bitcoin. The company is a social payments app backed by Goldman Sachs, it said in a recent statement.

“Using bitcoin for speculative trading or people buying and selling bitcoin because they think it’s fun — that’s not an interesting business for us,” Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s chief executive and co-founder, said in a interview with Reuters.

“It’s a distraction to have to support these customers given that our growth has been on our social payments business.”

This is a blotch on the digital coin which is being touted to be a big player in the near future as analysts see the global markets and physical currencies tottering amid political turmoil in some key markets such as the US and Europe.

Circle said that if customers want to buy and sell the digital currency, they would be instead directed to digital asset exchange Coinbase. Customers, however, continue sending money via social messaging, without fees, can still convert bitcoin stored via the service to dollars, pounds or euros and can still continue to store bitcoin using the Circle app.

The lack of progress in bitcoin’s technology is also a reason that has disappointed Allaire.

“A few years ago when we started the company, bitcoin is the only digital currency technology that mattered,” said Allaire “We obviously envisioned it as a mainstream phenomenon and we had expected more progress in terms of technology development, but the development has slowed in the last three years,” Allaire added.

As the company announced the launch of Spark, an open source project that provides a way for digital wallets to exchange value using blockchains, including bitcoin, it did this because it was around this time that Circle decided to develop its own technology being disillusioned by the technological development in bitcoing, Allaire said.

Primarily due to its usefulness in recording and keeping track of assets across practically all industries, blockchain, the technology that has powered bitcoin, has exploded over the last two years.

While ensuring that full compliance requirements are met, the initial focus for Spark is to connect digital wallets or accounts around the world.

Allaire said that South Korea’s Korbit and the Philippines’ Coins.ph are the two new markets that Circle has formed partnerships. Using distributed ledgers, sending and receiving value with those in Korea and the Philippines would be possible for Circle customers in the U.S., UK and Europe with the use of Spark. Making international payments will be as easy as sending a text or email messages, Circle said.

Since its inception more than three years ago, Circle has raised about $140 million.

The company is on pace to do more than $1 billion in payment transfers for 2016, Allaire said. Over the last year, its growth “has been in the 300-400 percent annualized growth range” in terms of user accounts, transactions, as well as, cross-currency activity.

(Adapted from Reuters)

Categories: Economy & Finance