Wikipedia Deleted Its Page for Poloniex

For this last week, @steemitblog has focused its spotlight on Poloniex with the #poloniexspotlight challenge. I've read many of the articles. Most of the articles focus on features of Poloniex and the future direction of the exchange.

I thought I would investigate its history.

I want to start by pointing out that Wikipedia deleted its page for Poloniex. Wikipedia redirects searches for "poloniex" to a company called Circle. Circle no longer owns Poloniex. Wikipedia has bad information.

he Wikipedia Talk Page advocates deleting the page for Circle claiming that neither Poloniex nor Circle satisfy their "notability guidelines."

Personally, I think that Wikipedia editors are self-centered pretentious twits. The site attempts to manipulate our world view by shadow-banning many important. I believe that the public at large was foolish to give credence and power to such an intellectually dishonest organization. A few years back I started making a list of important pages deleted by Wikipedia

Since Wikipedia currently has bad information, I decided to research the history of Poloniex and Circle. My research is part of a larger project that I started a few years ago in my effort to understand the merger chains that have come to dominate our financial world.

There are quite a few sites with articles about corporate mergers. Reporters tend to present merger chains with prose.

I think it is better to use a timeline structure to present merger chains; So, I've been experimenting with using linked HTML lists. The linked lists look boring for new companies, but they become quite intriguing for older firms.

Most importantly, since I am developing the pages with a standard format, I am able to update the pages as events unfold.

Anyway, I created pages for Circle and Poloniex.

The company called "Circle" was created as an investment vehicle for new online trading technologies. Circle received a huge amount of investment capital from Goldman Sachs. Apparently the investment was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

I encountered an online forum that described Circle as a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs.

Circle has engaged in efforts to create peer-to-peer payment systems. They hosted bitcoin wallets for a bit. They also created a "stablecoin" pegged to the US Dollar called USDC. Their site has tools for accepting USDC for payments and an API for interfacing with the currency.

Circle made two big purchases in 2018: They acquired a crowdfunding platform called SeedInvest and Poloniex. The purchase prices for Poloniex was $400 million USD.

It appears that Circle was trying to incorporate Poloniex into their web site.

In 2019 a mysterious company called "Polo Digital Assets" acquired Poloniex.

It turns out that Polo Digital Assets was an investment vehicle created by Justin Sun and the TRON Foundation.

Some of the reports on the acquisition seem to imply that Sun had inside connections with Circle. To what extent was IDG involved in the decision to sell to Sun? It would also be interesting to know the price that Sun paid for Circle.

My research is incomplete. I did not find a good page on the early history Poloniex. It would be interesting to know who provided the venture capital. I understand that Poloniex was the victim of hacking attacks which were costly to the initial investors. Did the hacking affect the decision to sell the company to Circle?

I did not find good articles on the direction that Circle intends to follow after it sold Poloniex. I also did not find good information about the future direction of SeedInvest.

I think it is important for people to document the early history of crypto. The deleted page on Wikipedia shows that the Internet is not doing a good job of documenting its own history. If you know of any good articles on the History of Poloniex, please drop a link in the comments. My effort is simply to create a timeline of events.