Since launching in 2014, Poloniex has had its time in the limelight as one of the highest volume crypto only exchanges

This was well before the days of stable coins pairs and even owning an altcoin was considered a betrayal against popularised Bitcoin maximalist philosophy.

‘Polo’ was known for easy sign-up, no KYC (Know Your Customer), a wide variety of coins listed, margin trading and even one of the first exchanges to offer funding/lending markets.

People still speak nostalgically about the trading room chat box, dubbed by traders as the “troll box”. It was famous for a stream of slang and profanities.

Over the past few years, Poloniex has lost significant market share to other exchanges. Binance has come along and significantly upped the ante for customer service and community engagement and Bitmex has offered much higher leveraged products with better trading engines.

OMG Airdrop

Whalepool trader Zeno questioned the Circle bosses about Poloniex never giving him his OMG airdrop. Despite the vast sums of ether he had deposited at the time of the distribution. To add insult to injury he said: “Poloniex even listed OMG as a token soon after” (but they still refused to give him his allocation).

“We inherited a customer service backlog of over 20,000 tickets at the time of the Poloniex acquisition,” Circle said.

“We have reduced this considerably in the last few months but also wanted to work on things like reviewing what assets we may want to list or de-list from the exchange.”

No direct feedback was given on Zeno receiving his tokens.

No listing fees

Circle moved the conversation on to more positive notes by saying that they “don’t charge listing fees” and cited smaller projects like the Loom network that has recently been added to their exchange.

They talked about Loom the same way most people in this space talk about ICOs, when they have skin in the game. “Loom is Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum that is ‘live’ in production. It is a network of DPoS (Distributed Proof of Stake) sidechains, which allows for highly-scalable games and user-facing dApps.”

This all sounds promising but level 2 scaling is a very competitive niche with projects like Plasma, RSK and even technical breakthroughs like mimble wimble all vying for attention among projects.

At the end of the AMA, Circle gave a closing statement about their excitement for their USDC stable coin launch. “This launch will enable our move into the security token marketplace”.

Poloniex is a very old crypto brand but Circle paid $400 million for something in February 2018, could circle be about to revitalise this exchange with a host of incoming security tokens? Time will tell, but they certainly seem to have the team and backers in place to make something happen.