100 usd to bitcoin exchange rates
12 commentsDogecoin news 2016 jan
Circle Internet Financial is de-emphasizing bitcoin services to focus on global mobile payments, it said Wednesday as it unveiled a new blockchain protocol called Spark and messaging features for its existing app. Users can receive and hold bitcoin in their Circle accounts and it will continue to be insured, but they can no longer buy or sell bitcoin on the app.
Circle, one of the earliest bitcoin exchange and wallet startups to emerge in the space, has also maintained one of the cleanest reputations. Customers can take their bitcoin trading activity to any third party and then use Circle to convert it to dollars, euros or pounds sterling but the cannot convert it back to bitcoin.
The announcement comes a week after a federal court in California approved a controversial request from the IRS to obtain the records of potentially millions of Coinbase users who had made digital currency transactions between and , highlighting tension between compliance and customer privacy for financial institutions.
Around the time it received its BitLicense, Circle rebranded its mobile bitcoin wallet app to Circle Pay, which has launched in the U. It also lets people send local currency to other digital wallets over the bitcoin blockchain.
That's the initial focus of its new open source project, Spark: Spark is a set of additions to the protocol that provides a way for digital wallets to exchange value using blockchains, including the bitcoin blockchain, and settlement layers. Because Spark is open source, any developer can use and implement the software. Circle said it intends to work closely with similarly minded ecosystem participants to advance the technology and integrate it with additional public and private blockchains.
The first implementation of Spark will be through two new partnerships, one with a Korean company called Korbit and the other with a Philippine company, Coins. Both remittance companies will be able to implement Circle's Spark application programming interfaces to allow U. The experience would have "the speed, security and cost efficiency of distributed ledgers, but with a pure fiat-to-fiat consumer experience" and is compliant with international KYC and AML standards.
Circle Pay also introduced new messaging capabilities. The app is now organized around people instead of transactions, it said. Payments exist in an ongoing conversation between the sender and receiver, a function they likened to the more widely popular messaging WeChat and WhatsApp. In September it integrated with iMessage to allow payments transactions through Apple's text messaging platform.
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