Circle, one of the earliest bitcoin companies, has sold its retail trading app to a 1-year-old digital asset broker named Voyager, which will take a 4 percent ownership stake in Circle through the issuance of common shares.
With the purchase, Voyager is acquiring 40,000 retail accounts from Circle Invest, adding to its existing 200,000 users. Circle Invest users will be converted to the Voyager platform by the end of next month.
This is part of Circle's shift in strategy to focus more on stablecoins, digital assets that are typically pegged at a one-to-one ratio to a more stable asset (like the U.S. dollar) held in reserve. In December it sold its over-the-counter trading desk and in June it shut down its Circle Pay app.
"They're going to come out with a whole breadth of products on [stablecoins]," Voyager CEO Steve Ehrlich told Cheddar, without sharing further details. "We're working on integrating that into our self-custody wallet application so people can fund accounts to buy or sell digital assets."
"We believe stablecoins are going to be the way people transmit money to other people, to merchants," he added. "Stablecoins are definitely the financial way of the future. It'll be the fastest, easiest and most productive way to move money across the globe."
Bitcoin, which also functions as a store of value as well as a currency, has a similar role in the future of money, Ehrlich said, for users that prefer an asset not tied to monetary policy; USDC, the U.S.-dollar backed stable coin developed by Circle and Coinbase, is just a payment mechanism.
"We see everything long term for retail consumers becoming more fungible so you can use any of your digital assets to buy equity securities, futures contracts, to buy options," Ehrlich said. "We're positioning ourselves to be able to execute on this mantra of a full financial services firm where everything becomes fungible to the consumer. If they want to buy equities at a moment's notice using bitcoin as a denomination why shouldn't they be able to do that?"
This is the second acquisition in a year for Voyager, a New York-based company that went public on the Canadian Stock Exchange last February. In October it acquired Ethos, a cryptocurrency wallet, and services provider.
Ehrlich said he expects more M&A activity since the cryptocurrency industry, now 11 years old, still has so many small startups looking to scale. He also said regulatory clarity around how crypto businesses should operate and treat digital assets will drive up costs for those businesses, and therefore drive up M&A.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
