Goldman Sachs-funded Circle has introduced a new feature for its crypto investment app Circle Invest that is geared towards newbie traders.
The feature aims to make market entrance for new investors and allows them to invest in a diversified portfolio of all seven of Circle’s supported cryptocurrencies all at once.
Customers can invest as little as $1, and their funds will automatically be diversified across the tokens, as per their market value. Circle builds in a 1 percent spread between the buy and sell prices, which is how it generates revenue, Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Allaire said.
“The vast majority of invested capital by individual investors and retail investors — the vast majority of any asset class, whether it’s stocks or bonds or currencies or crypto — is more passively managed,” he said in an interview Monday. “If you’re a newbie and you feel like you’ve missed out or you’re interested now in investing in this category, this is a tried-and-true model that’s worked in retail investing.”
Currently, Circle Invest supports bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), bitcoin cash (BCH), litecoin (LTC), ethereum classic (ETC), monero (XMR), and zcash (ZEC), and more coins will probably be added in the future.
There are no additional fees for the new service, which Circle clearly aims to market as a low-cost option and alternative to the growing number of crypto index funds that provide investors with a similar product, albeit with more functionality and a more familiar wrapper.
Just last week, news broke of Circle had a $110 mln fundraising round led by leading crypto mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain. They also announced they were partnering to create a USD-backed stable coin by summer 2018. The investment brought Circle’s valuation to nearly $3 bln, more than a sixfold increase since 2016.
