Summers will be a senior advisor to the Digital Currency Group
by Daniel Roberts
Yahoo! Finance
Digital Currency Group is busy these days. In the last four months alone, the company acquired the biggest bitcoin news site, CoinDesk, and along with it, the biggest bitcoin conference, Consensus; it also gave money to Coin Center, the bitcoin industry’s nonprofit advocacy group.
On Thursday, DCG announced a laundry list of new investors and additions to its team, and among them is one very big name: Larry Summers.
Summers, former Treasury secretary and former president of Harvard University, is joining DCG as a senior advisor. It is a reminder that Summers believes in the future of bitcoin, the crypto-currency that many fare still skeptical about. One year ago, speaking at the Museum of American Finance, Summers was asked about bitcoin and said, “We have seen so little innovation cumulatively directed at taking the frictional costs out of the system. The notion that there’s going to be a lot of innovation and experimentation around how those frictional costs can be taken out feels like a very important kind of idea.”