In a sign that the cryptocurrency market is starting to consolidate, bitcoin and blockchain startup Circle Internet Financial Ltd. has acquired cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex Inc.

The price of the acquisition wasn’t disclosed, but Forbes claimed that the number was $400 million, making it one of the largest acquisitions in the market to date.

Founded in 2014, Polinex describes itself as a “U.S.-based digital asset exchange offering maximum security and advanced trading features.” What it does is offer an exchange for altcoins, alternative cryptocurrencies usually released via an initial coin offering, to which some people, rightly or wrongly, ascribe value.

Poloniex exchange services, covering more than 100 markets, offers customers a “secure trading environment” — its 2014 hack aside — as will as advanced charts and data analysis tools.

Circle, which pitched the acquisition in a blog post as “a new vision for global finance,” is a five-year-old consumer finance company focused on secure, simple and less costly technology for storing and using money. The company, which raised $60 million in a Series D round in June 2016, is not new to the cryptocurrency world. It’s well-known in the U.S. for its online bitcoin wallet service.

“Poloniex addresses another key element of Circle’s product foundation: an open global token marketplace,” Circle founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire said in a statement.

With the acquisition, Circle said, it looks forward to scaling up Poloniex through market expansion and localization, increasing token listings where possible and “exploring the fiat USD, EUR, and GBP connectivity that Circle already brings to its compliant Pay, Trade, and Invest products.”

The acquisition likely will make Circle a “unicorn,” a startup with a paper valuation more than $1 billion. On the competitive front, Circle will now directly take on Coinbase, bitcoin’s first unicorn startup as of last August.

With contributions from Poloniex, Circle’s revenues over the past three months, excluding February, exceeded $250 million, placing the company on an annual run rate greater than $1 billion, according to Forbes. Coinbase is reported to have booked $1 billion in revenue in 2017, meaning by volume the companies are now close in size.

Image: Polinex/screenshot