Bitcoin startup Xapo has appointed Visa founder Dee Hock, ex-Citibank CEO John Reed, and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to its new advisory board.
Bitcoin wallet and cold-storage vault outfit Xapo was set up by Lemon founder Wences Casares, and has so far raised $40 million in funding from the likes of Benchmark, Greylock Partners and Index Ventures.
The appointment of three members of the Wall Street establishment comes as banks and stock exchanges are taking an increased interest in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Says Reed: "Financial services have remained largely untouched by the digital revolution. Bitcoin represents a real opportunity for changing that. Money at its core is simply a ledger for keeping track of debts and Bitcoin is truly the best iteration of a universal ledger we’ve ever seen."
Adds Summers: "Bitcoin offers, for the first time, a method for transferring value and making payments from anywhere to anywhere, in real-time, without any intermediary. This could mean we soon see many billions of people sending bitcoin everyday as easily as they currently send a text message."