Circle, a Boston-based fintech and cryptocurrency company launched in 2013, announced Tuesday a new partnership with Bitmain, which is leading a $110 million Series E equity investment in Circle.
Bitmain is "China’s biggest bitcoin mining company," according to The Financial Times, and the funding round "brings together two of the nascent sector’s leading companies from the world’s two largest economies."
The partnership will support the launch of "tokenized US dollar coins" called Circle USDC (or USD Coin), a new cryptocurrency - pegged to the US dollar - that Circle said it enables customers to purchase and use USDC fiat tokens for payments and trading in the crypto ecosystem.
Existing investors IDG Capital, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Digital Currency Group, and Pantera, along with new investors Blockchain Capital and Tusk Ventures, participated in the Series E round.
"Bitmain Co-founder and CEO Jihan Wu is well known for espousing a vision similar to ours regarding the creation and adoption of a new global economy powered by cryptographic assets, distributed contracts, and open source blockchain technology," Circle co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire wrote in a blog post. "We are excited to be working directly with Bitmain on realizing our shared vision."
