Circle buys Elements and announces beta version of Crypto Payments API
“Lowering barriers of entry for payments and financial services and establishing dollar payments utility are core to Circle’s mission.”
USD Coin (USDC) and Euro Coin (EUROC) stablecoins issuer Circle has acquired Elements, a merchant and developer-first payments orchestration platform, as part of its accelerated crypto payments roadmap.
Circle is uniquely positioned to promote digital payments and an always-on financial system as native features of the internet. Creating a payments platform that allows merchants to accept USDC and other crypto payments at the point-of-sale is a natural progression of the growing global adoption of digital currencies.
At Circle’s inaugural Converge22 conference, Jamal and Hao Min, co-founders of Elements, joined Circle CPO Nikhil Chandhok onstage to demo Circle’s Crypto Payments API which is now available in beta as well as the one-stop checkout SDK for crypto merchants which will be available in Q4 2022.
The firm plans to quickly scale payment offerings to unlock utility value for crypto and lower the barrier of entry for merchants to access next-gen payments and financial services. The new payment offerings make it simple for merchants to integrate their existing PSP relationships with Circle’s crypto payment offerings.
Establishing dollar payments utility
Nikhil Chandhok, Chief Product Officer at Circle, said: “We are very impressed by the Elements team for their work in taking the complexity out of crypto payments. Lowering barriers of entry for payments and financial services and establishing dollar payments utility are core to Circle’s mission. Providing well-designed payment products that can facilitate seamless, efficient, frictionless and delightful customer experiences are key to empowering merchants to take advantage of these next-gen payment solutions.”
Nafis Jamal, Founder and CEO at Elements, commented: “Elements’ mission is to put more money into the hands of merchants. With Circle, we knew the natural synergy in our business models would create an opportunity to deliver a seamless and low cost payments and settlement experience for merchants using a digital currency they can trust. Today’s news is only the beginning of our joint mission to deliver first-class payments offerings and define the next generation of payments.”
More than $49 billion USDC is in circulation as of Sept. 28, 2022, and it has powered more than $5 trillion in on-chain transactions since its 2018 inception.
