In a recent blog post, the Crypto heavyweight Circle stated that their OTC business had assisted their progress over $24 Billion worth of trades. As it is not reported publicly, given the OTC trading volumes, this is quite a huge number for them. And, at the same time there’ s been a lot of discussions over the Crypto OTC desk in regards the institutional investor activity.
For the entire crypto ecosystem, the Circle Trade has become its core liquidity provider.
Circle claimed that in 2018, over 10,000 trades were executed by over 600 counterparties. Executed and, over 36 assets and primary consumers of the desk were spanned by these traders including miners, hedge funds, founders, crypto funds, proprietary trading firms, and VC’s.
Despite a tumultuous year for the industry, Circle Trade has continued to expand stating that they boarded a record number of new institutional clients, with a growing 24/7 operations coverage in the US, Europe, and Asia
Circle’s has over a thousand institutional partners from all over the world after having an experienced significant growth over several product offerings from the United States, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. And there’s an increased in the headcount and complemented by this growth– over 150 new hires.
Apart from the OTC desk, one of the earliest crypto exchanges Poloniex was acquired by Circle in early 2018. Subsequently, there was a series of regulatory and engineering upgrades as updating the customer identity verification and signup process.
Over 2018, there were new crypto assets added by Poloniex in line with top exchanges in the industry such as EOS, MANA, KNC, LOOM, BAT, SNT, FOAM, BNT, and USDC.
There were over 20 assets that were delisted from Poloniex while more were added onto the platform. Moreover, during 2018 there was a reduction from over 200,000 to 1000 open customer support tickets.
Apart from this, Circle Asset Framework was introduced which provides a better plan for reviewing assets and guidelines introduced within the Circle’s products.
Circle also added another notable feature: Bitcoin Cash Fork. Apart from this, USDC with a base pair of fiat markets were launched.
