Circle just raised $50 million, but we’re guessing it didn’t rush to convert those dollars to bitcoins.

Circle has perhaps the slickest user experience of the many bitcoin-related startups that blossomed in the last few years. As a consumer play for using bitcoins, Circle is as good as it gets. It’s easy to buy bitcoins, sell them, and send them to your friends. Using them to pay in other apps or in-store seemed the logical next step.

But the company is now moving away from a pure bitcoin play to potentially bring in a wider audience that may shy away from the risk associated with sitting on bitcoins. With the $50 million funding round announced yesterday, co-led by Goldman Sachs and China-based IDG Capital Partners, Circle is expanding its functionality to allow users to hold FDIC-insured U.S. dollars and move them quickly and inexpensively via the blockchain. From the company’s press release:

Customers with dollar accounts gain all of the benefits of digital currency — instant, secure and free payments to anyone in the world — without holding or explicitly converting dollars into bitcoins.

So it’s bitcoin without the volatility of bitcoin. Presumably, Circle is taking on some of the risk of the currency conversion, because the transactions are not completely instant. But even more to the point is this statement:

This way, customers can choose to view Bitcoin not as a new currency to replace the dollar, but as an Internet payment network that enables secure, instant, global and nearly free payments.

It’s hard to state the triumph of the blockchain versus bitcoin-as-a-currency more clearly than that. At this week’s Inside Bitcoins conference in New York, a “Blockchain Agenda” ran alongside the main bitcoin-as-a-currency agenda. It seems these two paths will continue to diverge as time goes on.

Circle has about $76 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase.