While 2018 was a somber year for cryptocurrencies, one company that really stood out in terms of expansion and development is Goldman Sach’s backed Fintech start-up Circle. To answer key questions about the company and to spell out the company’s outlook for 2019, CEO Jeremy Allaire and President of Product and Operations, Sean Neville started the ‘Ask Me Anything (AMA)’ session on Reddit.

On January 10, Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville, the two co-founders of Circle, took on Reddit to have a chat with community members regarding company’s outlook for 2019. The two co-founders also gave a glimpse of their interaction with regulators, the exchange’s contribution to open source projects, the USDC stablecoin, mainstream adoption of crypto, market conditions, over-the-counter (OTC) trading, and the emergence of security token offerings (STOs) and privacy coins.

The Reddit post for the AMA session first speaks about the year gone by, 2018, and also lists down the milestones that the company was able to achieve. Quoting from the post;

“2018 was a particularly eventful year in Circle’s six-year history as a crypto finance company. We acquired Poloniex and committed significant resources to restore it as one of the premier crypto exchanges. We launched Circle Invest for anyone looking to seamlessly invest in crypto. In partnership with Coinbase, we founded the CENTRE Consortium and introduced the USDC stablecoin, which has already reached a market cap of over $345M and has support from almost 100 exchanges, protocols, platforms, applications, and wallets. Lastly, we announced our intention to acquire SeedInvest, which is pending FINRA approval.”

On being asked about Circle’s attempt to educate regulators and biggest regulatory hurdles, Jeremy Allaire mentioned that the company is continuously speaking and educating regulators, not just in the US but globally as well. Jeremy also mentioned that he has teams that are located in the US, Europe and Asia which are continuously working with regulators. According to Jeremy, regulators too are keen to learn and the team at Circle spends a lot of time trying to get them to understand the benefit of cryptos and how it actually works. Also, Jeremy feels that the biggest and most immediate regulatory hurdle we face is the lack of specific guidance from the SEC on how to classify various crypto assets.

Upon questioning about his views on the “bottom” of this bear market, Jeremy mentioned,

“My general perception is that the markets have been oversold and that some core assets have decoupled from their usage, which suggests they are undervalued. We look at things like hashrate health, on-chain activity, as key indicators of usage and adoption and underlying unit economic support. We also believe that many assets have traded in a tight correlation to BTC, which is irrational. As the markets mature, we expect less correlated trading as investors better understand the value, utility, and adoption of specific crypto assets and networks. The significant increase in quality information about different assets helps the market better understand the differences in crypto assets.”

The timing of this AMA was really apt as the confidence in crypto markets is really low at this point of time and the answers provided by the Circle team could actually help in bringing back the confidence of investors in cryptocurrency.

Is Jeremy correct in this view regarding the market bottoming out? Do let us know your view on the same.