Tokenization is the Future, Says Jeremy Allaire

By Chetna Phour

According to Jeremy Allaire, the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of the Boston based digital currency company Circle, tokenization is the future of everything. He believes that in the near future there will be tokenization of everything.

Circle is a peer-to-peer payment technology company which was founded by Jeremy Allaire in 2013. Circle Pay, the mobile payment platform of Circle allows the users to hold, send, and receive traditional fiat currencies. In 2015, the company received first BitLicense from the New York State Department of Financial Services, and in 2016, the British government approved the first virtual license to Circle. Until 2016, Circle Pay also operated as a Bitcoin Wallet service to buy and sell Bitcoins. The company has claimed to focus resources on global social payments and future generation blockchain technology. To serve the unbanked Circle has launched a Bitcoin Blockchain based remittance and messaging application.  Circle is not interested in just one aspect of cryptocurrency.

Circle has received over $135 million venture capital from 4 rounds of investments from 2013 to 2016. In February 2018 the company acquired cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex for $400 million. With this acquisition, the company wants to become the first regulated crypto exchange of the United States. Acquiring Poloniex is the long-term plan of the Circle to challenge one of the top crypto exchanges of the world, Binance. Poloniex is going to play an important role in meeting Circle’s goal of tokenizing real-world assets.

Increasing popularity of stablecoins also attracted Circle and the company launched their stablecoin USDC which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. The project is structured as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain and launched with 30 partners. Many of these partners are known as respected and globally known crypto companies like payment processing company BitPay.

Jeremy Allaire is excited about the future of the company and believes that there will soon be a tokenization of everything. He said that “assets such as traditional stocks will eventually be tokenized, allowing them to exist on the blockchain.”