Circle Internet Financial Ltd. announced today a $50 million infusion of investment capital co-led by Goldman Sachs and IDG Capital Partners. Alongside this investment, Circle also revealed that IDG Capital Partners, a leading China-based venture capital firm, will assist the service in meeting Chinese market needs and Circle is also adding features that allow customers to hold, send, and receive US dollars.

Circle is best known for producing a consumer-facing bitcoin wallet service that attempts to simplify the experience of purchasing and using bitcoins via the web and mobile devices.

Goldman Sachs and China-based IDG Capital Partners were joined by all of Circle’s existing investors in this round, including Pantera Capital, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Fenway Summer, Digital Currency Group, and other individuals. This $50 million investment raises cumulative investments in Circle to $76 million total.

Circle hopes to use the new funding and contacts to enter in the Chinese marketplace. IDG Capital Partners brings with it a long history of China-based investments including outfits such as Tencent, Baidu, Ctrip, CreditEase, and Xiaomi.

Although China’s position on bitcoin has been somewhat rocky—and in fact Baidu initially showed interest in bitcoin in 2013 but quickly reversed course after rumors of Chinese bank bans on bitcoin—means that China may be a tough market to crack.

Today in 2015, Bitcoin exchange and mining services still exist in China, and Bejing-based HaoBTC recently announced a vision of becoming the Coinbase of China—a reference to Coinbase, Inc. the popular competitor to Circle’s wallet service.

New US dollar features

Circle just introduced a new feature that allows users to hold, send, and receive dollars—all while keeping the same benefits as using bitcoins and without ever explicitly converting between the currencies. Also important: dollar account balances held by Circle customers are FDIC-insured.

Now, if Circle customers choose to hold dollars instead of bitcoin balances, they can still pay merchants who accept bitcoins. Circle handles the instant conversion from dollars to bitcoins at time of payment. This is also true of the reverse where customers can accept bitcoin payments and Circle will instantly convert it into dollar amounts.

A common issue with the bitcoin ecosystem is the volatility of the currency as well as the friction of exchanging bitcoins to local currencies and vice versa. Circle’s new dollar account features would help ease many of the problems of holding and spending bitcoins for both consumers and businesses by allowing account balances to exist in dollars while acting like bitcoins (due to the instant conversion.) With other services that instantly liquidate bitcoin payments into local currency only merchants escape from volatility woes; with Circle’s system consumers will also be less effected by volatility.

With this feature, customers comfortable with either can still enjoy the benefits of both currencies, including bitcoin’s low cost, instant, and secure transfer capabilities.

Circle is currently selectively enabling customer accounts with this capability and will add more every week until the feature is entirely phased in.

photo credit: Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license); and screenshot of dollar account feature on mobile via Circle.

iPhone photo by btckeychain