Circle, the cryptocurrency brokerage service, has released a new “Buy the Market” feature on its investing app in a new update. The new feature allows retail investors to purchase market cap-weighted positions in the various cryptocurrencies listed on the platform.
This lets people decide how much they want to invest in crypto, then automatically distributes it among the choices on the platform based on each coin’s current circulating market cap.
The options currently on Circle are Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Monero (XMR), ZCash (ZEC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), with more being added in the future. Zcash was the most recent option added, at the beginning of this month on the May 1 update.
This seems to be a direct shot as a low cost alternative to the cryptocurrency index funds being launched by many financial firms, and will allow people to invest on the concept of cryptocurrency as a whole, rather than one specific coin or option.
Index funds launched by companies such as Bitwise Asset Management and Coinbase require users to be accredited investors, however, while Circle’s option is open to anyone who put money in. This limits some of its features vs the index fund, but gives an option similar to them to a wider retail audience, and allows opening a market-cap weighted position at a very low cost.
Circle recently raised $110 million in Series E funding, and was assigned a $3 billion valuation. The Goldman Sachs-backed fintech startup released its Circle Invest app after beta testing in March, and was created with the aim to compete directly with Coinbase in providing users immediate, commission-free cryptocurrency asset trading and investing.
The Circle Invest app is available on both the Apple App Store and on Google Play for Android devices.
