Circle, a Bitcoin wallet and payment service, has been a very long time in coming and has carried with it a great deal of hype. The seemingly secretive service went through a recent closed-beta round where invites where at a premium; now the service has come out of beta and is now available to the general public. Sign up on the Circle.com website.

The product behind Circle is a sleek, well built web page with a strong eye towards user experience and this leads with mission of the company and website.

“When we set out to build Circle, we imagined a new kind of Internet-centric consumer financial service, one that the average person would find enjoyable and powerful,” says Jeremy Allaire, CEO and founder of Circle.

Upon logging into Circle, customers are greeted with a simple, no-frills dashboard that puts the primary functionality of the product front and center. Immediately visible is the dollar value of bitcoins stored in the customer’s wallet (in my case $8.08 worth of 0.02088294 BTC) and the current conversion rate of 1 BTC to USD. Beneath that appear two prominent buttons in green “Add Funds” and “Withdraw Funds”.

Recent activity is also displayed, giving users an idea of what sort of financial transactions are occurring with their money.

Users are also invited to transfer bitcoin to their account, via a specific Bitcoin address at Circle. And even attach credit cards and bank accounts to their Circle account to facilitate the frictionless exchange of bitcoins for local currency.

The company claims that people will be able to get credit cards and accounts hooked up within minutes instead of days. This capability makes Circle a competitor to Coinbase when it comes to consumer relations due to the ability to buy bitcoins directly without having to go through an exchange.

One particular point of friction for the mass adoption of Bitcoin has been the difficulty for consumers to get bitcoins in their digital pockets, Circle seeks to help ease that as much as possible.

The website is simple, straightforward, and takes pains to make itself understandable to people who are not familiar with Bitcoin. However, Circle still lacks mobile apps so the experience is entirely web based (see below.)

International appeal

One big part of Circle’s mission is to appeal to the broadest audience possible. Not only does this mean a good user experience and a sleek, functional UI, but it also means speaking multiple languages. At launch, Circle announced that the website is available in seven languages, which collectively cover about 40% of the world’s population.

Circle’s website, apps, and customer support content is delivered in English, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish (Latin American), German, and French.

With this attention to internationalization, Circle hopes to continue to expand capabilities for international customers over time.

iOS and Android mobile apps

There are no native apps for Circle on smartphones yet, however the company does assure the public that they are coming. The company gave a sneak peek of the iOS and Android apps today at the Sibos international banking conference.

In the meantime, users can make use of the Circle.com website on mobile; it does work extremely well with a UI responsive to smaller screens.

Image credit: Circle.com account page; screenshot by Kyt Dotson