Stable Times at Circle: A Crypto Startup Counted Out Is Rebuilt and Riding High

Asked if crypto market conditions had affected Circle's business, he gestured to his co-founder and Circle's president, Sean Neville.

Despite being a year of decline for the crypto sector as a whole, 2018 was a banner year for Circle.

In 2017, the year of retail piled into crypto and seemingly every media outlet on the planet stoked the mania, Circle was mostly MIA - if a bit less so than most people realize.

Almost exactly five years before I spoke to Neville and Allaire, Circle entered the world with a bang.

Allaire had just moved from CEO to chairman at his latest venture, the video platform Brightcove, and his goal with Circle was "Making bitcoin extremely easy for consumers and merchants to adopt."

In December 2016 Circle removed the ability for customers to buy and sell bitcoin, and to send it to other bitcoin addresses, using Circle Pay.

For one, cross-border payments on the Circle Pay app still used bitcoin, by way of a hazily defined new technology Circle spoke about at the time, called Spark.

More importantly at least in retrospect, Circle maintained the trading operation it had built to power Circle Pay.

Despite its radio silence, in other words, Circle did not really miss out on the crypto boom.

In a way, the out-of-control growth the industry experienced in 2017 provided Circle with rare opportunities to rebuild its crypto offerings.