Circle Internet Financial Ltd., which maintains a bitcoin wallet and merchant services, said today it will cease allowing customers to buy and sell bitcoins.

This change shows a shift in the company’s approach to the bitcoin marketplace away from bitcoin as a customer-held currency to an invisible back-end for sending money across borders.

As a virtual currency, bitcoin continues to garner a great deal of attention, and ventures such as Circle have raised a lot of money to follow that money. Since its founding in 2013, Circle has received over $126 million in venture capital to innovate in the bitcoin industry space.

In the time since 2013, Circle has also seen stiff competition from major bitcoin wallet and exchange services such as San Francisco-based Coinbase, China-based OKCoin and others. The underlying technology that supports the bitcoin network, the blockchain, has also gained attention and traction in the financial technology sector for its utility in tracking value and property, both virtual and physical.

Circle notes that it will continue to expand in the fast-growing marketplace of international payments. To do this, the company hopes to use ease-of-access and user friendliness to provide services through peer-to-peer money transfers via text, e-mail, mobile and other means.

“Our vision has never been, let’s adopt a new currency,” Jeremy Allaire, chief executive and co-founder of Circle, told the Wall Street Journal. He said that over the years, bitcoin has not emerged as a customer-centric electronic money replacement itself, but could still be used to facilitate money movement across borders invisibly, under the hood. “We want to realize overall consumer benefits without having to be a bitcoin buying-and-selling exchange.”

The use of blockchain technology to facilitate international remittance and intrabank transfers has been a common theme following the proof-of-concept that bitcoin provides.

In 2015, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, best known as SWIFT, announced the Global Payments Innovation Initiative, which turned attention to the blockchain as a vehicle for international transfers. Visa’s European innovation lab, Visa Europe Collab has also explored the blockchain for intrabank transfers in September 2016.

As for everyday folks, recently Poland-based Billion Group recently raised $2 million to provide a very similar customer-focused electronic money platform in Europe.

This news also comes on the heels of news that major bitcoin wallet and exchange Coinbase, Inc. had been contacted by the United States Internal Revenue Service about its customers’ identities and habits. While Circle said it received no such letter, the possibility of increased regulation on the U.S. bitcoin industry is hard to ignore.

Allaire also commented that Circle’s blockchain-aided payments system showed much better growth than its bitcoin payments.

By removing the option to buy and sell bitcoins, the company intends to focus entirely on allowing customers to simply exchange with local currency and not worry about the underlying platform. The company currency allows exchange with dollars, pounds or euros (availability based on where the customer lives).

The company also adds that it will provide the best exchange rates with no fees.

This process is as easy as signing up for Circle’s service on the web and then using the company’s mobile app. It is available for web, Android and iOS.

Featured photo credit: Bitcoin Mittelmeerlandschaft via photopin (license)