Where is Circle going?

Last week, consumer bitcoin app Circle revealed it was the first company to be granted a BitLicense by New York State (license number BL 000001), and also noted that it will enable peer-to-peer transactions in dollars, without involving bitcoins in any way. This amounts to investing a large amount of time and effort in bitcoins, while simultaneously hedging against it by introducing non-bitcoin functionality.

Circle commented at length when BitLicenses were first proposed. The final form of BitLicenses does incorporate some suggestions from the bitcoin community. Sean Neville, Circle’s cofounder, described the process of getting a BitLicense here. (Spoiler: It was painful.)

This all comes at a time when bitcoin is falling out of favor and blockchain technology is preoccupying the press.

The latest update from Circle also renames the app “Circle Pay,” introducing possible confusion with new mobile payment company Circle Plus Payments, and moving it away from that other payments company named for a shape, Square.

Both Circle and its well-funded competitor Coinbase have always kept things simple for users. A Circle account, for example, does not have a single public bitcoin address (those look like this: 31uEbMgunupShBVTewXjtqbBv5MndwfXhb), but rather employs multiple addresses to protect users’ privacy, Circle says. This is just one way users are kept away from the nitty gritty details of bitcoin transactions on the blockchain. Circle is as easy to use as any P2P service out there, but bitcoin functionality is what currently differentiates it from the likes of PayPal, Venmo, and Square Cash.

Circle is well-funded, too — according to Crunchbase it has raised $76 million compared with $106 million for Coinbase — and has plenty of runway to develop new services. (21 Inc., which builds bitcoin-mining machines, is the best-funded cryptocurrency startup at $121 million.) The question is, what new services will Circle offer? Its ambition extends far beyond just making bitcoins easy. The video below, for example, was released on Sept. 21, and it doesn’t even mention bitcoins, unlike previous Circle videos.

Learn more about payments developments at Bank Innovation Israel, Nov 10-11 in Tel Aviv. Click here for details.