By
Mercy Tukiya Mutanya
October 12th, 2023
Xapo, a bitcoin wallet based in California, has announced its new board members, which include former CEO of Citibank, the founder of Visa and former Secretary of the US Treasury.
California-based bitcoin wallet Xapo has informed that former US Treasury Secretary and former executives at Citibank and Visa have become the members of the company’s advisory board.
According to Xapo, the founder of Visa, Dee Hock, ex-CEO of Citibank, John Reed, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers have joined the board of directors, what demonstrates the growing potential of the digital currency in the financial industry.
The move is expected to help Xapo improve its position as one of the leading bitcoin companies in the financial industry.
Today, banks and other financial organizations are showing huge interest in the virtual currency and the blockchain technology.
“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,” Reed said.
Summers, who is an active supporter of bitcoin, also works as a part-time adviser to Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in 2009. Besides, he is one of the main investors behind the globe’s major bitcoin exchange Coinbase and a member of the board of directors at 21 Inc.
“Until now whenever we’ve needed to transfer money we’ve had to rely on a third party, whether it be a bank, a clearing house or a payment network,” Summers noted in a blog post on Xapo.
“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,” he added.
Meantime, Hock noted that although we are living in the 21st century, we are still using dated control organizations.
“Bitcoin is one of the best examples of how a decentralized, peer-to-peer organization can solve problems that these dated organizations cannot. Like the Internet, Bitcoin is not owned or controlled by any one entity, so it presents incredible opportunities for new levels of efficiency and transparency in financial transactions,” he stated.
Xapo was established by technology entrepreneur and bitcoin advocate Wences Casares in March, 2014. Last year, the company raised $20 million from such investors as Benchmark, venture capital companies Index Ventures and Greylock Partners. In total, the amount of funding reached $40 million. Casares is also the founder of Lemon, a digital wallet platform that was acquired by LifeLock for around $43 million in 2013.